An Imago of Rust and Crimson
by EarthScorpion
Summary: Brockton Bay. A slowly rotting, fog-wreathed city in a decaying world where things lurk in the shadows. And that's what I thought it was even before my powers opened my eyes. I wish I could ignore what I see. I wish I could forget. I wish I could escape. But I can't. The Other Place is always there. Thanks go to Revlid for editing.
1. Chrysalis 1-01

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Arc 1 – Chrysalis**

**Chapter 1.01**

Madness. It's a funny word, isn't it?

Well, no. Not really. It's not a laughing matter. Perhaps that's why we make jokes about it. It scares us. It scares us profoundly. Every last thing about us, our us-ness, is in our heads, and to have your head not working like it's meant to means – in a way – you're not really you. But you feel like you're you. So you're not you, and you are you, all at the same time. Can the 'you' you think you are be a different person from the 'you' everyone else thinks you are? Of course it can, but we don't like to think about that sort of thing. It calls into question who _you _are.

That's what scares us. The idea that our mind might not be our own, that we can be changed and tweaked by some chemicals going wrong. It's the sickness of our times; the thing that's taken the place of smallpox and cholera and gangrene. Perhaps it was inevitable. As soon as diseases became things which could be seen and cured, we had to find a new monster which couldn't be seen and couldn't be fought. What we're scared of, as people, as a society – it's pretty telling, isn't it? You can read a lot about us as a people from our fears.

Are we all just insects, blindly squirming through life? Will we all die tomorrow when an Endbringer shows up? Who's the person thinking this? Who's the person reading this? Hell, who's the person _writing _this?

And when you're talking about questions of identity, you can't help but bring up names. I used to wonder why superheroes and supervillains alike went around with their monikers. Most of them do it because it's something that's done, because they think it'll give them safety against someone who isn't trying that hard, because everyone else does it.

Some of them, of course, know why. Names have power. Names define the self. Names define how we're thought of.

Well, my name, from a certain point of view, is Taylor Hebert. And if you ask everyone else, I went mad.

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><p>…<p>

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><p>The first sign that something strange was going on was at the school gates. I was always wary when approaching them, because that was a favoured place for certain people I really didn't want to see to lurk. I always tried to arrive in a crowd, or otherwise get in just before classes start.<p>

I swallowed deeply. So, here it was. Another day of school. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

There was just one thing which was making me pause here. I had spent a lot of time hanging around the entrance to the school, and yesterday there hadn't been a fancy pair of wrought-iron gates. The school certainly didn't have the budget for that kind of thing. They looked like they belonged on some fancy private school, or an old churchyard, or something like that. And they clearly weren't something new. The paint had flaked off them almost entirely, exposing black iron flecked with rust.

I shivered, and looked up at the slate-grey sky. Could I have just missed the gates? In all the time I was here? It hardly seemed likely. But I ran my hand over the gates, feeling the cold metal under my hands, its roughness, and I was sure they were real. They didn't feel like they were some kind of fantasy. They were just… gates. Made of rusty iron.

I mean, technically it could have been some supervillain ploy, but I was fairly sure that there was no villain called 'Gatemaster' who went around installing gates in high schools. At the very least, he'd have hit the news. I'd probably have heard of him. Or her.

Maybe I could just… not go to school today. No. It wasn't the gates which were freaking me out. That was just a displacement activity. I had a real and pressing reason not to go to school, and it wasn't some silly iron gates I couldn't remember. Maybe they just hadn't registered, I thought to myself. After all, who really pays attention to gates? They'd just had them fitted over the winter holidays. The reasons why I might want to just skive off lay inside the building, not outside. No, I'd get in worse trouble if I didn't go in. My dad would find out, and I'd have to explain things to him – and I really didn't want to do that. And they'd just take it as a sign that they were winning. If I didn't stick it out, things would just get worse for me.

The unpleasant feeling of cold sweat beading against my forehead, I swallowed and darted through these strange gates. First day back after winter vacation, and I was already waiting with bated breath until spring break.

The corridors were so very lonely. I felt far away from everyone else in them, as if miles rather than feet separated me from them. It was if an unseen bubble was forming around me, people just drifting out of my way. Everyone else had others talking to them, people glad to see them again after the holidays. Not me. I mean, things hadn't been so bad just before the holidays, but it had been the loneliness then which had been getting to me, and it was the loneliness which got me now. Most of the others just ignored me. I didn't mind that so much. It's not like you expect a sweeping ovation when walking down the corridors. But there were a few people I knew, a few people I had used to know more closely, and at best their gazes swept over me, almost like they were ashamed to look at me.

Maybe I was just projecting, hoping that they were feeling ashamed. I'd like to think that would have felt ashamed if someone I had used to be on normal speaking terms with was now someone I treated like… well, like how I got treated.

But that was better than the looks the others gave me. No sign of _those _three, but some of their hangers-ons caught my eye as I made my way through the corridors, and in their eyes lurked a certain dark giggling malevolence which made me feel deeply worried.

Checking my watch, I saw that I had plenty of time before I had to get in, and it was a bad idea to arrive too early. I'd just end up sitting there with no one to talk to. I decided to go to the toilets. I had a book in my bag, so I could just read in there for a while.

The girl's toilets were a mess. Worse than usual, I 's a public school, so they're hardly the Hilton, but three of the lights in the ceiling were broken, and someone had scrawled all over the mirrors in lipstick. The term had only just started. We were probably going to get some kind of talk as a school about the need to 'treat school property properly'. That'd what we'd got the last time the bathrooms were vandalised in a major way, and this was worse.

I shook my head at the meaningless wavy lines on the mirror – grumbling a little at the fact that the school would of course be far more worried about lipstick on a mirror than more important things – and went into one of the cubicles which was still lit. Putting my bag down and lowering the seat to sit on the closed cover, I got out a book. I didn't open it though, instead staring at the cover.

This wasn't the book I'd packed this morning. I thought I'd picked up… no, this did look familiar. 'Fereydun's Foe' – I thought I'd seen it on my dad's shelves at some point. It looked kind of like some of the self-help books he read; you know, 'how to stay calm and get what you want from negotiations' and that sort of thing. I turned it over, and looked at the back – the standard mass-produced approval ratings. 'Five out of five stars', 'cathartic', and all the other things which someone paid to say what the published wanted might say.

Idly I flicked through it – eyes raised at some of the diagrams within – and then put it back in my bag. Drat. I must have picked up the wrong one. Just about in line with today. I'd probably forget where my locker was next or something. I was distracted, nervous, feeling strange sensations of déjà vu. Things were fine. Everything had been better since mid-November or so.

But why did I feel sick, nervous, and anxious? Was it just paranoia and nerves? Well, come to think of it, the noise of the water in the pipes did sound a lot like whispering. It was just a faint susurration at the edge of hearing, but with no one else going into these toilets – probably because of the broken light and vandalism – it was all I could hear, beside my own breath.

And here I was, creeping myself out. Shaking my head, I left the cubicle, and stared at myself in the mirror, adjusting my glasses. The lipstick on the mirrors made it hard to find an untouched area to see my whole face in, but I managed it in the end. The poor light cast long shadows over my face, and made me look even paler than usual.

I turned on the taps, to splash some cold water on my face and wake myself up. The water which came out, however, was freezing cold and flecked with rust. I yelped, flinching away. There was no way cold water should be that cold. It was like having liquid ice cubes poured over my hands. Great. So the toilets were just a mess and what now? Had the boiler blown or something? What the hell had happened here over the holidays? Had there been some kind of accident? Had a disgruntled student triggered, and decided to go and mess the place up?

Actually, if that was the case, the school authorities would probably be getting on my case. I mean, look at me. 'The quiet sort', 'a loner', 'few friends'. All I'd need to be is male, and I'd be hitting too many of the stereotypes for 'school blaster' for anyone to be comfortable.

I yelped again when one of the remaining lights overhead in the bathroom blew. Wide-eyed I stared back at my reflection, shrouded by the layer of lipstick between it and me. This… this wasn't funny. Whatever was going on. I shouldn't be in here. Maybe I was being set up and people were just waiting outside to catch me red-handed. I dried my rust-flecked hands on my jeans, and left as fast as I could. I was just going to grab the things from my locker and go.

No one was waiting for me outside the bathroom, to point the finger of blame. But that was not reassuring, because no one was in the corridor at all. And that wasn't right at all, because when I checked my watch, classes wouldn't start for almost quarter of an hour. The corridor should have been just as packed as it had been when I went into the toilets. Hell, I'd only been in there for maybe five minutes, if that. Probably less.

But there was no one here. Had… had people been evacuated? No, that wasn't right. There was no fire alarm. Maybe I was running late? No, I checked my watch again, and it was working. I laughed to myself, a bitter note in the sound. I had been feeling alone as I walked through the halls and now I actually was alone. It wasn't an improvement.

Where was everyone?

I took deep breaths, trying to stop myself worrying. Maybe… yeah, my watch must have been wrong. Which meant I was late. Which meant I had to head straight to the lockers to grab my stuff, and apologise for being late on the first day back. If only I'd had a phone, it'd have been up to date, but as things were going this morning, I'd probably have left it in my room even if I had one.

My feet beat against the dark tiles of the corridors. They sounded almost as loud as my heart.

And I managed to keep on lying to myself until I was right at the locker room. Because if I was to be quite honest, I was lying to myself. Even if classes had started, then I would have been able to hear people. I would have been able to see people, in the classrooms I quite deliberately avoided looking in. I ignored that I climbed down more flights of stairs than existed in the school to get to the locker room, and I ignored that all the paint was missing from the walls, leaving bare concrete and the exposed steel bones of the structure.

It was only when I stepped into the locker-room itself, which was somehow in this place it should not have been, that I realised that I was just shambling through routine. Trying to control my breath and avoid hyperventilating, I crammed my fist into my mouth and whimpered into it. No, no, no. This didn't make sense. What was I doing here? Everyone mysteriously vanishing? The way the familiar corridors and ceilings of the school were all unfamiliar? No, something was happening which really should not be – whether I was ill, or some kind of cape-related phenomenon was going on, or some other stranger thing, I didn't know.

The floor was wet, ice-slick. Someone had split red juice all over the floor. It was cranberry, by the smell of it. And it was almost cold enough in here that it could be ice. My guess in the toilets must have been right. The boilers for the radiators of this bit of the school must not be working. The ventilation ducts were spewing cold air into the locker room in vast cyclic blasts, beating pulses which left me shivering.

I heard a noise behind me, and turned. What I saw defied explanation.

There were three of them and yet there were one. Three faces; Sophia Hess, Emma Barnes and Madison Clements and yet they were mere extrusions of something horrible.

I screamed and I kicked and I wept. All was for nothing. I was weedy, weak, worthless. Dark-skinned Sophia, eyes black and irisless grinned as she bent my arms behind my back, one knee to my kidneys enough to knock all breath out of me. Emma's red hair was a blaze, too bright for my dimming vision, and she tore off my satchel, throwing it to the ground. And Madison, her 'cute' yellow cardigan strangely out-of-place in the pain-filled world I was now living in, was waiting by a heavy iron door, holding it open for her syzygy-selves. For me.

Still, I fought against the three-faced monster which grabbed for me. Laughter was the only response I got to my screams.

It did nothing. The knife-scent of rust and iron and vileness wafting from the cell-locker tore its way through my nose as I was dragged towards it. And unceremoniously, I was forced inside, pain stabbing into my front and sides from the contents of the jail. The grinding of the bolts to my prison being dragged into place echoed for a long time, until after the laughter had faded.

That's when the nails started to dig into my flesh, red-hot daggers within me. That's when the tiny things began to crawl over my skin, wet little wriggling insects sullying me with their touch. And that's when the voices started.


	2. Chrysalis 1-02

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.02**

The smell wasn't the worst bit, though it was horrible beyond belief. The darkness wasn't the worst bit, though there was so little light I could barely see what filled my cramped prison. The pain wasn't the worst bit, though rusty nails lined the inside of the locker like some kind of low-budget medieval torture device. The worst bit wasn't even the voices, which whispered just outside of comprehension and only got louder each time I screamed.

The worst bit was what I could feel against my skin.

I can't begin to describe it. I could talk about the damp. The putrid _sensation _of sticking my hands in _filth_ so that I didn't fall onto nail-lined walls. I could talk about my blood. It crept down my skin whenever I gashed myself, cooling and congealing at it went. I could even talk about the wriggling. The mess under my hands, fermented tampons and worse, seemed to crawl between my fingers, creeping everywhere it could.

But that wouldn't encompass the whole. It wouldn't cover the burning muscles that set my skin on fire, and couldn't stop me from slipping into the foul walls. It wouldn't cover how the smell and the feel combined, so I could taste the blood and rust and piss and shit and menses in every breath, leaving me lightheaded and even weaker. It wouldn't cover how my mind ran in circles, knowing it would get worse if I didn't move and worse if I did, so shuffling was as agonizing as stillness.

Sensory deprivation is meant to be a kind of torture. Somehow, they'd managed to find something worse than that. There was just enough light for me to see the things inside, if I strained. The screaming whispers were horrible to listen to, but I couldn't help but try to understand them. All I could do was concentrate on smell and pain and touch, amplifying the worst things I could think of.

I'd like to claim I found my centre. Discovered some kind of inner resolve that let me withstand it. Spent my time thinking about how to escape the box, how to get revenge. Managed to stay cool, calm and collected, knowing that I'd be found when classes were over.

Of course I didn't. First I screamed to be rescued, and then I just screamed. I cried. I whimpered. I swore and I prayed and I cursed. I begged anyone – anything, everything – for help. I yelled, to drown out the whispers as much as to attract attention.

"Help me," I screamed. "Help! Anyone! Please! No, help, help!"

The distorted echoes washed back to me, deafening whispers made up of my own voice, "No help."

"No anyone."

"No one."

Nothing came. I was alone – utterly alone. The monster wearing my tormentor's faces had gone, and the school was empty. The whispering, moaning, screaming voices were mine. All of them. My own cries, reflected and refracted and distorted, endlessly. Hours? Minutes? Seconds? Days? The only sense of time I had was my own heartbeat, and that beat like an insect's wings, slicing seconds finely into an eternity.

As far as I was concerned, every human being might have been scoured from the face of the earth. Huge gulfs of time and space and the filthy metal walls of my prison separated me from anything else.

I don't know how long I'd been in there until I started seeing things. Not long, I think, but I couldn't be sure. That's what happens to people put in sensory deprivation. The mind starts seeing patterns in the dark. They're not real.

That's what I whispered to myself, at least.

… Emma sneered down at me. I was sprawled down on the floor, against clean tiles, the betrayal cutting through my mind. She was my friend! Why was she acting like this? Contempt and amusement and guilt orbited her, each wearing her face. There was no guilt in the intangible hordes which surrounded the other two. As I watched, Guilt-Emma weakened and sickened before my eyes, Contempt eating her alive.

… my father yelled at my mother. This was the first time they'd argued like this, and the heat of his anger was almost palpable. I could feel it, even through the walls. He screamed at her and she screamed back and everything went wobbly for me. Their words danced around me, burning like magnesium candles. The door slammed shut, bouncing on its hinges, and she screamed one last remark back at him. One _final_ remark because…

… my mother clutched the wheel of her car with whitened knuckles. Her eyes were reddened. There were still tears in the corner of her eyes. She reached for her pockets, pulling out her phone.

"No!" I screamed, and even from my unseen vantage I could hear the mocking echoes from inside the jail-locker. "No! Please, Mum, no! Don't! Put it… no!"

She didn't listen. Perhaps she couldn't. It had already happened, I couldn't do a thing to change it. I was helpless, useless, trapped as a watcher just as much as I was trapped in a stinking locker. She had the power to do it, and I had none to change her decision.

I saw every last moment. I saw her last moments. I'd wondered what had happened, how it had gone down. Just the morbid imaginings of a child who'd lost her mother. It wasn't the same. There had been more blood in my imaginings. A certain edge of the cartoonish. It had been a closed casket funeral, so I hadn't ever seen the body. I knew that meant it had to have been bad. Watching in person, it was almost pathetically simple.

When the hallucinations ended, I wanted them to start again. Wasn't that horrible? I would prefer to endure the betrayal of my best friend, the shouting of my parents, and the death of my mother than I would to be myself. I would rather experience the worst bits of my life up until now, over and over again, than live one more second in my own body.

They didn't just show me those three scenes. They showed me everything. My entire life - or so it felt - reflected in a harsh mirror. Every least cruelty against me and every thoughtless deed I'd done. In its own way, it was almost an offer. This is the world outside this box, it said, and this is what you've made of it. Are you proud?

I screamed, begged and protested when I was seeing the worst days of my life paraded before me. I did just the same when I was trapped in the nightmare-world of my existence.

No help. No end. Nothing.

"What do you _want_?" I gasped hoarsely.

"What do you want?" echoed back my own voice.

And all the time, the filth on the floor of the locker-jail and on the walls crawled against my skin, as if it was alive. Creeping and squirming against my bare flesh, reminding me of where I was and what had happened to me. The bloody things hanging from the nails in the locker twitched. Their movement was only visible out of the corners of my eye.

Maybe I was already dead. I considered it, accepted it, rejected it several times. If I was dead, I had no idea what I'd done to deserve this. I wanted to die, though, if it would make this stop.

The voices laughed at me. They seemed to be encouraging it.

I raised my hands, staring at my palms. In the dim light, I could see the source of the crawling. Insects, the colour of old dried blood, camouflaged against the filth. Looking closer, they weren't worms. They were caterpillars. Specifically, they were the kind of caterpillar I'd seen on some documentary on the television, from – yes, it had been Hawaii, I thought hysterically.

The only place in the world that had carnivorous caterpillars.

They were under my skin. Burrowing in, another set of stabbing pains in my world of agony. I could see them, bloody red bulges of bruised and torn flesh which worked their way through my arms. Their nibbling sounded, of all things, like woodworm. A thin scratching noise, like fingernails against a wall, only coming from inside my body.

Maybe this was another hallucination. Yes, that was appealing. There was no reason there would be carnivorous caterpillars in my locker. You didn't get them around here. I was just having some kind of traumatic breakdown from, you know, being locked in a filth-filled locker. I could just ignore them, and the pain. If this was another hallucination, I could welcome the other ones, which at least didn't hurt in the same way. I could let Emma betray me, let my parents argue, let my mother die. It wouldn't hurt me the same way. I could just sit back and let it happen.

I could already see the lights flashing before my eyes, the visions waiting for me to sink into them. A surcease from pain of the flesh. The numbness of acceptance was just within reach.

Something inside me rebelled. Maybe it was pig-headedness, a refusal to accept that laying back and accepting it would make anything better. It hadn't before. I couldn't just let things happen to me. Maybe it was a simple survival instinct. I didn't want to be eaten alive by bugs. I'd take pain over death. I screamed all the louder. I didn't care if the demon-monster wearing the faces of my tormenters came back. I wanted to live.

Knife white-pain stabbed through one arm, and I crumpled into one of the walls. The squirming and crawling around the joint told me something had just started eating into my tendon. Once again, the visions welled up, offering a painfully nostalgic relief from pain.

I laughed out loud, a hint of madness in my voice. The bugs didn't want me to stay here? That meant I had something to fight against. Something in all this place which wasn't me. And that meant I had to beat them. I had to get the bugs out of me, and then I'd have won.

A pain in my leg, and I sagged, falling. One of the nails in the walls went clean through my flesh, and I screamed, jerking away. I squinted through the dim light at the dark patch of blood oozing through my clothes, and the caterpillar impaled on the metal barb, skewered like a sausage on a cocktail stick.

So that was it, then? Stab myself with rusty nails to kill the worms inside me and pull them out? It didn't make sense that it had come out so cleanly, but with a sudden cold realisation I _knew _it would work.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done. After the first one, I was crying. After the third, I had no voice left to scream. I couldn't find them all, so I resorted to scrabbling at my skin with my fingernails, trying to squish them. It was insane, but I had to do it, had to keep going. If I stopped doing it, I'd never start again, and then they'd eat me alive.

When it was done, I was shaking like a leaf, gasping and crying. A mess of locker-filth and my own blood, tears coated my face. I had bitten my tongue, and I welcomed it, because the iron taste of fresh blood blotted out the stench of everything else around me. I leaned against the locker, marking it with two bloody handprints, exhausted. All around me, dead caterpillars hung impaled on nails, not one left wriggling inside me.

The pain was everywhere. I could feel blood tricking - and more than trickling - from each of my wounds, and I think I fainted.

But I must have regained consciousness, because the door gave way, and I staggered forward, out. Light washed over my eyes, leaving me screaming at the brightness. And following me, from out of my stinking jail, tore ten thousand bloody butterflies, their wings marked with the whorls of my fingerprints. I collapsed onto the cold tiles, welcome blackness taking me.


	3. Chrysalis 1-03

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.03**

I was called back to consciousness by a slow, methodical bleeping. The light was too bright when I opened my eyes, and I felt my eyes water. When my vision had somewhat cleared, all I could see was an unfamiliar ceiling. Letting my head fall to the right, I saw pale pinkish walls. It felt like too much effort to check the other side.

I was also feeling good. No, as in, _really _good. The kind of good you never normally feel. Like all the stresses in the world had just rolled off me.

"She's awake!" I heard. After a moment of thought I realised it was my dad, though he sounded slightly off. He moved into my range of vision, dragging a chair, and sat down. His clothes were rumpled, and he mostly looked relieved.

"Hey, dad," I managed weakly, smiling fuzzily. My voice sounded croaky. Groggily, I realised he'd been crying. His eyes were reddened. "I…" I wasn't sure what to say. I wasn't sure of very much at all.

He glanced at someone else, with a hint of nervousness, and then forced himself to smile. "Hey, kiddo," he said. "Nice to have you back with us."

"I don't think I went anywhere," I said.

"Awake, then," he said, his mouth twitching.

I blinked owlishly. "I think. Uh, I might still be asleep," I said. "It's all warm. Oh. Am I, uh, late for school?" I swallowed. "I don't want to go," I said weakly. "It was all… strange."

He chewed on his lip nervously, running a hand through his hair. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "Does… does it hurt?"

I smiled. "No. I feel… good," I said, with some thought.

"Your wrists don't hurt?" he asked, leaning forwards.

"Hurt? No. Why would they?"

My dad looked miserable. "They found you in a locker," he said. "Did you try to k- you'd clawed at the locker door, and. And." He gulped. "And at yourself," he said weakly. "Please, Taylor, please, if… I mean, it must have been… bad in there, but please tell me that you're fine now. That you don't want to- that you want to keep on living."

Keep on living? What was he talking about? Ah. "Oh, no," I said. "I just… I had to. To get the insects out. Stop them. Eating me. Stop them with the nails on the walls." I sighed happily. "Left them skewered."

His brows furrowed. "Taylor, what are you talking about?"

"Lots of. Caterpillars. The ones from… the island place. In the Pacific. They were trying to eat me, when. I was seeing things. Bad things. But I managed to get them all."

"Mr Hebert," said the nurse, his worried eyes narrowed, "please, stay calm. She's on a lot of painkillers at the moment, so she's not entirely lucid. And remember what we talked about earlier?"

Ah. So something like morphine was the reason I was so fuzzy and warm and happy. That made a lot of sense. Wow. No wonder people get addicted to this stuff. I'm – as many people could tell you – not usually a fuzzy person, but this was great. I just felt like smiling at everyone and everything. I could get used to this.

My arms felt like plaster blocks, but I managed to lift one and rest it on my dad's. "Sorry if you were worried," I managed. "Didn't mean to get locked. Inside the locker. But probably. No one apart from them. Saw it. And they're not going to talk." I giggled. "Three heads are worse than one," I said, which was hilariously funny.

I felt his fists bunch into balls. "You're okay now, Taylor," he said. "The school is… well, they're paying for this, and… listen, the hospital can get me if you need to talk to me, but there are some people I need to talk to… though I can wait if you want to talk about anything. Anything at all. Or want anything else."

I yawned. "I think I want to sleep again," I said.

And with that, I was drifting back off into warm soft sleep.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The clock on the unfamiliar bedside table flashed a green 03:17 at me. My bandaged hands were aching, and my throat was dry and sore. And all the hair on the back of my neck was standing on end.

Oh well. The painkillers had been nice while they lasted.

My throat felt like it was on fire. There was a sports bottle on the table beside my bed. I vaguely recalled that someone had said something about how that was there for me. I lifted my arms, feeling like they were made of lead, and stared at my hands. Well, I certainly wouldn't be holding a pen for a while. The bandages made me look like I was wearing mittens. My wrists really hurt whenever I tried to move my hands. And I didn't think that my fingernails were in a very good state. My fingers felt hot and tight, which meant they were probably infected.

That wasn't surprising, considering what I'd been putting my hands in.

With both hands, fighting the weariness which filled me, I managed to pick up the sports bottle with both hands. Whoever had put it there was a lifesaver, I thought, when I managed to get it to my mouth, pulling open the sports cap with my teeth. Maybe a third of the bottle later, I felt sufficiently human to try talking.

"Ow," I croaked.

Hmm. That was expressive of my feelings, but not too useful. Maybe I shouldn't try talking. I could remember a lot of screaming, so I probably didn't have much of a voice left. And…

… and I'd told my dad I'd tried to get the insects out with nails, I realised with dawning horror, as my mind mercilessly picked through what I'd said when I was in the warm happy place from the painkillers. Oh shit.

Part of my horror was an instinctual reaction. What had happened in there somehow felt intensely private. Telling someone about it, even my dad, felt like I'd just been seen naked. Most of it – pretty much all of it, really – was because I'd just told my dad that I'd been trying to kill insects under my skin and from the way he'd reacted… oh boy. And I'd started laughing at my own pathetic joke, in a not-very-sane way. And I was in hospital and everything hurt and I was sure I'd been impaling myself on nails. And oh, please, please, please let him not think I'd actually seen a demon-monster thing. Had I said anything which might make him think I had? I wasn't sure.

He was going to think that I was crazy. And the nurse had been there too. So the hospital might think it, too.

A wave of nausea passed through me. I trembled from the cold shivers.

Maybe they would just think I'd been babbling while on the drugs. I really hoped that was true.

For all I knew, I had gone crazy. Anyone might have, when they were in that kind of place. I might have just already been having a small nervous breakdown when going back to school, and then _that _had happened. It would have been enough to push anyone over the edge.

I shuffled myself into an upright position, body aching and complaining. At least I wasn't tied to the bed or anything else which young adult novels had told me indicated I was a suicide risk. There was the glint of a camera in one corner of the room, but maybe that was normal. I hadn't exactly been in hospital much.

Did I feel suicidal? I checked, and decided that no, I certainly didn't want to die. That was reassuring. I did want more of those drugs, but that was because my everything was aching. Or sometimes hurting. And maybe I shouldn't have any more, if I couldn't control what I said when I was under their influence. I didn't feel crazy, and the world around me looked normal, but I didn't want other people to find out.

What would Emma, Madison and Sophia do if they knew? There was a girl in my year who'd tried to kill herself, and people who sort of knew her treated her differently.

Again, the nausea came. I wanted some fresh air. There was a window to my left, the curtains closed. It might have some small bit which could be slid open. I wormed my way out from under the covers of my bed, and swung my legs out.

My shins poked out from under the hospital gown I was wearing. There were several long blue plasters running along them, but they looked – and felt – better than my hands. I couldn't see or feel the bit where I was _sure _I'd torn out a chunk of flesh from my calves on a nail. Maybe that meant I wasn't as hurt as I thought I was. My legs still felt weak and useless.

When I got out of hospital, I was going to get into better shape. I promised myself that. If I'd been stronger, if I'd been fitter I would have been able to stand longer. And maybe I'd have been able to run from the three-faced monster which had worn the faces of my tormenters. Or maybe just from the three of them, if I was already having a nervous breakdown at the time.

The floor was cool under my feet as I staggered to the window, and I nearly fell. I forced myself to shuffle along, arms waving as I tried to keep my balance despite the pain. Eventually, I managed to cross the few metres of floor, and tug aside the curtains.

There was a moth on the windowpane. That was strange. It was January, and I could see frost everywhere. It was probably just very cold, trying to warm itself on the heat from the window. I sagged forward, resting my brow on the cold glass.

Now that I was upright I could feel how chilly it must be outside, and reconsidered whether it would be a good idea to open the window. Even if I wanted to face the cold, one problem was how useless my arms felt. Given the clumsiness of my bandaged hands, even if I _could_ get it open I'd have problems closing it. Another was that the window seemed to be locked, and I couldn't see a key.  
>No fresh air for me, then. Well, at least the cold glass against my forehead was nice. And right now it seemed like a lot of effort to walk – okay, totter – back to my bed. I'd just rest up for a while before trying it.<p>

What the hell had happened to me? I looked down at my bandaged hands and wrists. I… I had wanted to die in that locker, yes. But I didn't think I'd tried to kill myself. I nudged down my sleeves, checking for the nail punctures which should be covering my forearms. No sign of them there either. And - at least before today - I wouldn't have said that those three would have tried to kill me. They probably wouldn't have gone to the effort of covering the inside of a locker with nails.

Maybe I had just been seeing things? If I had gashed myself on one of the brackets on the inside of the locker, I could have just panicked.

Maybe – and here I barely dared to hope – it was a trigger event? I'd read up on them at some point – the moment when a cape gained their powers, hero or villain. They were supposed to be moments of great personal stress, and I had been more than stressed back then. Did I have powers? How could I even tell?

I thought really hard about flying. I didn't fly. Thinking very hard about energy beams, feeling strong, and controlling the electricity in the clock had similarly little effect. Any hope that I had a super-regeneration power was thwarted when concentrating on my hands only made them hurt more.

Guess I wasn't going to be the next Alexandria, then.

It was just a silly dream. That kind of thing didn't happen to people you knew in real life. I leant my forehead back against the window, staring out into the dark. Sodium street lights lit up the cold, playing over my face. I shivered, the hair on the back of my neck standing up. At the edge of one light, I could see a gang of youths, swaddled up in heavy clothing, spray-painting something on one of the empty shops over the street. The letters 'ABB'. Another bunch of gangers, with nothing better to do than make a mess. Sad.

What was going to happen to me now? I was clearly going to be in hospital for a while. After that, would I go back to school? What was going to happen to my life?

Over in the middle distance, a streak of white light in the sky drew my attention. It clearly wasn't a bird, and it was moving too low and too erratically to be a plane. It was also approaching, low and fast. I shivered. Of course it was coincidence that a cape would show up just as I was thinking about them. It wasn't a sign.

Still, I watched as the glowing figure, trailing white light, descended from the sky. The gang members paused, one of them jabbing a finger in her direction. I saw another draw a gun, which glinted in the yellow street-light.

The figure raised a hand, and a blinding flash of white light lit up the street. I winced, blinking back tears. It had been painfully bright for me; I had no idea what it must have been like for the gangers. Wiping my eyes on my shoulder, I managed to catch the last bit of the brutal-looking beating the woman was giving them. I strained, trying to get a closer look at her. Maybe I could at least find out who it was later. I thought it might be Photon Mom, but I couldn't see too well from this distance.

She flashed white again, and my head reeled. Colours danced in front of my vision, like I'd pressed my fingers into my eyeballs. I staggered, almost falling, but managed to cling onto the wall. Light flickered in front of my eyes and my head ached, just like it had when I'd woken up.

Well, maybe later I could find out who was flying around Brockton Bay using white light. Turning, I staggered back to bed, clumsily slipping into the warmth of the covers.

If I dreamed that night, I didn't remember it.


	4. Chrysalis 1-04

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.04**

It was dark. I couldn't get out. I could taste the blood on my tongue and every inhalation made me want to vomit. I couldn't get out. The pain stabbed through my arm, and I screamed.

I couldn't _ever _get out.

I woke, gasping for air. My clammy skin was cold against the morning air. I smelt of fear, the hot, damp sweaty tang filling the room. Rolling onto my side, trying very hard not to bang my hands, I whimpered. I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep. But I couldn't get a proper night's rest.

The nightmares were getting worse and worse. As they brought down the dose of the painkillers – something I had asked for – I was dreaming at night. Dreaming again and again of the locker.

Letting out a shuddering breath, I tried to think of something else. The clock on the bedside table was showing 07:39. It was only just light outside, and the world I could see through the crack in the curtains looked grey and dull.

Regular. Mundane.

Maybe I could ask for a night-light, to see if sleeping in a better-lit place would stop the dreams. Or I could ask for more painkillers. Maybe my body was associating the pain in my hands with being back there.

No. I couldn't let them know what I'd seen. I couldn't control what I said when I was on the medication, and I didn't want people to think I was crazy. I'd already let my dad know more than I wanted him to. I wasn't sure if he knew that it was Emma, Sophia and Madison who'd pushed me in there, but I'd heard him shouting on the phone outside. He wasn't letting the school handle things. He had taken things to the police. Someday soon, I'd have someone come in to take a formal witness statement.

Just the thought of that made my mouth feel dry. I painfully reached to the sports bottle on my side table, and found it empty.

Damn. My eyes went to the sink in the room. Over the past few days, I'd found just how painful trying to do anything was. My injured hands were torture in their own right. Not just because they hurt – though they did – but because they made me useless. There were so many things I couldn't do for myself. I could get out of bed and make my way to the sink. Unscrewing the lid of the bottle, filling it up, and then resealing it? I honestly didn't know if I could do it.

I was still going to try. I hated being useless.

Painfully, I levered my aching body out of bed, and stumbled over to the mirror above the sink. I looked exhausted. My lips were pale, and there were bags under my eyes. There were plasters down both cheeks, covering self-inflicted wounds. I tried not to look at them. Apparently they were shallow, didn't seem to be infected and might not scar. I was still vain enough to not want to think of what I might see when the dressings came off.

Holding the bottle in both hands, keeping it held up more through pressure than any grip on it, I managed to unscrew the cap with my teeth. I kept it gripped in my mouth, because I certainly wouldn't manage to pick it up again on my own. I managed to wedge the bottle under the faucet, and I thanked whoever had designed this hospital that the tap was a lever design.

There were flecks of rust in the water.

I screamed, spitting out the bottle cap, and leapt back. Of course, I fell back, landing heavily on my bottom, which joined the chorus of aches and pains. Much more prominent was the stabbing pain white-hot from my hands. I bit back another scream, eyes watering.

There was a clatter of feet from outside, and one of the nurses entered. "Taylor," asked the nurse, alarmed. "What happened?"

"I just fell," I lied. I put on a fake smile, trying to slow my breathing. I wiped my eyes on my shoulder. "I thought I could manage to refill the water bottle on my own. Looks like I wasn't as steady on my feet as I thought I was."

The woman tutted. "You should have just rung for help," she said, not unkindly. "I know it must be frustrating, not being able to do things for yourself, but you need to give yourself time to heal."

"I didn't want to be a bother," I said weakly.

"Look! You've gone and started bleeding again," she said, holding my hand out for me. I could see the dark stain spreading on the middle finger of my right hand, soaking through the dressing. "Young lady, forget 'not being a bother' and just ring if you want your water refilled. Your hands are infected. I don't want you making yourself any worse!"

My cheeks were flushed, from humiliation as well as pain, while she helped me back to bed. I would have been screaming from frustration, if I hadn't been terrified out of my wits by the sight of the rust in the water.

The nurse refilled the bottle, and made a note on the sheet at the end of my bed. With a stern 'Next time, call for help', she departed. The water was clear this time. There was no sign of rust. But of course there wouldn't be, because I'd run the tap.

I wasn't seeing things. Hopefully.

I cried myself to sleep, and I wasn't sure if the tears were coming from frustration, pain or fear.

Of course, I didn't even get a proper amount of rest out it if. I got woken up by my dad, who told me that he'd got a sudden phone-call asking if they could take my statement today. Then came the humiliating bit where he fed me breakfast, because I couldn't hold cutlery myself. Somehow it was worse than when the nurses did it. There was just enough time after that for him to sponge down my face so I at least wasn't so sweaty, but I wasn't going to be winning any beauty pageants looking like this. Not that I would have won them anyway.

The policewoman was a somewhat-overweight motherly looking Hispanic woman. She was wearing lily-of-the-valley perfume, and had a red butterfly clip in her hair. Just the sort you'd want to be talking to an 'emotionally fragile' teenage girl, I thought cynically.

I wondered how many sad stories like mine she'd heard, and whether she really cared when she heard another one.

"So, Miss Hebert… or would you prefer me to call you Taylor?" she began, after pulling up a chair beside my bed.

"Taylor," I said.

"Okay, Taylor. You can call me Maria. I'm here to take a witness statement from you… have you ever done that before?"

I shook my head. "No."

"Well, okay. Basically, what's going to happen is that I'm going to ask you some questions, and I'm going to record the conversation. We can go at your own pace. All I want you to do is try to be honest and say everything you remember. Just stick to what you can remember, do you understand? Don't make guesses – just say if you don't remember something or if you're not sure. And if you lie, you can get in trouble, so don't do that, okay?"

I swallowed. "I understand," I said. I understood, but I still wasn't going to say everything.

"Now, you can have your dad in here, or I can ask him to leave. Which would you prefer, Taylor?"

I was in two minds about that. If he was here – he was my dad. And I was going to actually, possibly, really be getting the three who did this to me in serious trouble. When I put it like that, it was a scary idea. It felt better to have him here. But on the other hand, if I let things slip, I didn't want him to hear.

"I'd like to be alone," I said. I felt awful just from the way he looked at me when I said that. I tried to look apologetic at him, but I'm not sure if it worked. The cop cleared her throat, and I turned my attention back on her.

Something flickered in the background. No, that wasn't quite it. It was more like the background flickered. My dad and the woman stayed where they were sat, but the world around them changed. Just for a moment.

"Taylor?" the cop said kindly. She could obviously see my expression, and how my breathing had sped up. "Is something the matter?"

Was something the matter? No, of course nothing was the matter, officer. I mean, it wasn't as if I had just seen the walls around me as bare concrete, rust bleeding from the exposed beams in loops and swirls. It wasn't like the temperature had just dropped twenty degrees for a few seconds, and all the hair on my arms was standing on end. It wasn't like I had just heard the water in the pipes.

"My hands just hurt," I lied. It wasn't actually a lie, even. They were hurting more. "I bent them by accident," I added.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the cop said. "Do you want me to get some…"

"I'll be fine," I said quickly. "I just… well, I'm still on some painkillers, but not as much as I could have because I really don't like the way they make me feel. Some pain is better than the dizziness."

She tucked back a stray lock of hair. "Do you think you can go on?" she asked.

"I'll be fine," I assured her, ignoring the expression on my dad's face. I thought the staff might have told him that I had asked them to reduce the dosage of painkillers a bit, but apparently not. Yes, asking him to leave had been a good idea. I didn't want to think about what he'd say when he found out about all the bullying last term.

"Well, okay," she said, pulling out a recorder from her pocket, along with a few lapel mikes. "If Mr Hebert… sorry, but she's asked you to leave and…"

"I understand," he said slowly, pulling himself to his feet. "I'll… I'll just go get some food at the canteen, how about that?"

The door slammed behind him with a grating shriek of metal against metal. I bit down on my tongue to avoid yelping at that sound, and tried not to think of what the momentary flash had revealed to me.

I tried my very best to make it through the interview. Focusing on the questions and carefully working out my answers helped. As long as I was otherwise occupied, I didn't have to think of the burning figure who stalked out in place of my father, or the hollow-eyed porcelain doll which had replaced the cop who was listening to my every word.

I wasn't going mad. I was just stressed out and tired. That's what I told myself.


	5. Chrysalis 1-05

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.05**

The horizon ahead was blood red, meeting iron-grey clouds above. The car's engine droned meaninglessly as I stared out the window, watching the illuminated signs flash by. McDonalds, Walmart, QuikSave, Belco, Burger King, Taco Bell. The outskirts of Brockton Bay was a mess of out-of-town shops, fast food, fuel pumps and industrial estates. They were relatively lively along the freeway, but I knew the side roads were packed with abandoned warehouses and closed stores. Most of the meth in the city apparently came from around that post-industrial hellhole. Not that we were headed here for that.

I was just waiting for us to get to Ye Olde Asylum, which would be now stocking all-new Taylor Hebert as a hopefully-limited time offer.

Of course, it wasn't really an asylum if you looked at the paperwork. We don't have them anymore. They're a legacy of a less enlightened era. That was what I'd been told. They didn't do things like cutting up your brain or electrocuting you to try to make you sane again.

But call it an asylum, a loony bin, a funny farm, a psychiatric inpatient ward, or whatever. It was where I was going.

"You want to stop and get something to eat?" my dad asked. He tried a weak smile. "You don't know what the food's going to be like in there."

"Sure," I said.

We pulled in to the nearest place – it turned out to be a McDonalds – and dad went in to grab something for us. By unspoken mutual agreement, we ate in the car. There were conversations we didn't want other people to hear.

"It's just for a little bit," my dad, swallowing a mouthful of Big Mac, told me. "Probably only a week or two, if that. They just want to watch you for a while, in a nice and safe and quiet location. And…" he trailed off.

"… the school doesn't want me back," I said, finishing his sentence for him. I picked at my fries. I wasn't feeling hungry, but I forced myself to eat. At least I could mostly pick things up again. "Not until they know for sure I'm not going to go embarrass them by killing myself and you making a fuss about how they did _nothing _to help. I'd really hate to be an inconvenience to them. Or get them bad publicity in the press. Worse than I have already."

He pursed his lips. "Look," he said, taking a deep breath, "for my part, I'd quite like to see that you're feeling all right. I know you're not feeling all right about it. You're having nightmares and flashbacks. I don't want you to suffer, kiddo. You do get this, right? I know you've been trying to tough things out so I don't get worried, but that's just worrying me even more!"

"It's not quite…" I began.

"Please. Taylor. Listen to me. You don't need to worry about the cost – it's not going to bankrupt me or anything like that – because they're paying for it. I'm sure when they find you're fine – which they will do when you've talked about things and had a chance to realise nothing like this will happen again – they'll give you a clean bill of health and we can put all of this behind us."

We had already had this conversation. More than once, actually, in the weeks I'd spent recovering in hospital. I ran my fingers over my new wrist-bands, which covered the self-inflicted scars. My fingers were still a mess, with blue bandages covering regrowing fingernails. I'd been lucky, they'd said at the hospital. It had been touch-and-go for a while for some of my fingers. The infections had nearly claimed some of them. I still couldn't feel things properly with two fingers on my left hand, and it hurt to bend them.

"Of course, let's all put it behind us," I said, bitterly. My dad's face went red, but I didn't care. "Because that's what they want, isn't it? The school doesn't like that the cops are involved. Let's just turn it into a story about how I'm crazy and tried to kill myself."

I'd told the policewoman who'd come in to get details that it had been Emma, Sophia and Madison who had done it, and that no one else had been around. I'd left out that they'd been three aspects of a demonic force, because that was the sort of thing you didn't say to the police. I was sure it had been them. They had the motive and their past actions supported it.

Of course, they had denied it. Which turned it into a she-said-she-said case. There was just no evidence, and the school would trust the word of Miss Popular, Miss Popular-with-a-rich-lawyer-for-a-dad, and Miss Athletic over a weirdo loner like me. The idea of getting fingerprints or DNA was laughable because there were years of greasy fingerprints over the lockers, and as for DNA – well, half the girls in the school would show up as having contributed to the blood in there. And there were no witnesses. I didn't know if that was because the three of them had really done it when there was no one around, or just that no one had come forward. I liked to think that it was the former. After all, even if everything had been all weird, I hadn't seen anyone else around. My faith in my schoolmates wasn't high enough that I could rule out the latter.

My case hadn't been helped by the way I'd been waking screaming, four nights a week. It had got worse once they'd reduced the painkillers. When I was no longer in a drugged stupor, I dreamed I was back in the locker. Usually, I woke up when the first nail went in. Usually.

It wasn't just the dreams. I'd see flashes of the weird empty, cold, rusted world I'd seen during the day. I'd made the mistake of letting my dad know, too. Not the full details, of course, but when he'd found me crying in my bed after going to the toilets and seeing, just for a moment, the lipstick on the mirror, I hadn't been any state to lie to him properly. It was getting worse the less sleep I got. I was seeing flashes of the cold, empty, rusted world most days. So he 'knew' that I kept on having flashbacks to just before I got shut in the locker, and was having nightmares.

In my calmer moments, I half-thought that maybe some time as an in-patient in a psychiatric place might help. Maybe if I talked about it, things would be better.

But if I talked about it, they'd think I was really crazy. So what if I was having nightmares? Anyone would be having nightmares if they'd been shut in a locker like that. So what if I was having flashbacks? They'd fade with time. And it wasn't really my fault that I'd hit that nurse who'd come to check on me when I'd been having a nightmare. I wasn't even awake when I did it.

Still, the prospect of spending time away from school… it wasn't unappealing from a certain point of view. I didn't want to see Sophia, Emma or Madison ever again.

I just didn't want people to think that I was crazy.

We finished our meals, and headed on, the winter sunlight fading. The place itself was just outside Brockton Bay, a distance back from the main road where the outskirts trailed off. On first inspection, the central building on the complex looked like it had been converted from a hotel. At least that was better than looking like it had been converted from a prison.

The hotel feeling was reinforced by the presence of an entry desk, and a place to check in the one bag I was permitted. It was going to be searched for contraband. The elderly man sitting behind the desk gave my dad some papers to sign. I just looked around, feeling lost. Mid-way through the paperwork, a woman arrived and gave the pair of us a talk on the 'code of conduct' and how there were medical professionals on staff and how they were here to help me.

There were a thousand little things like that, which all seemed to be summarised by 'we're here to help you, and so you should do what we tell you to do and take any medication you get prescribed'. It blurred into a mix of words and rules and smiling people whose expressions didn't reach their eyes. I just sat there, letting the words wash over me, and tried to ignore the churning feeling in my stomach.

Perhaps eating a greasy fast food meal had been a mistake.

My dad squeezed my hand. I gasped, and he winced. "Sorry," he said, pausing while he reset his chain of thoughts. "You're going to be all right," he said, and I wasn't sure if he was asking a question or trying to reassure me. Or possibly trying to reassure himself. I bit my lower lip, and tried not to look scared or cry. I don't think it worked too well, because he wrapped me up in a big hug. "I'll visit whenever I can get time," he promised, choking up.

"Thank you," I whispered.

With our farewells said, I was taken to get dressed in more 'appropriate' garments, which was a nice way of saying that I didn't even get to choose what I wore here. The baggy pyjamas that were waiting for me in the changing room were a statement in their own right. We don't trust you with your own clothing, they said. There wasn't even a bra. It had to go, in case I used it to hang myself. That was a thing people did, according to books. I would have been worried rather than just insulted if… uh, the lack had been a major hardship for me. My mum had only gone up to a B-cup after having me, and I took after her there.

Someone of a more philosophical bearing might have looked at the symbolic meaning. We were going to be treated like little children in here, so the lack of one of the signs of womanhood was appropriate in a perverse way. I wasn't feeling in such a state of mind, and thus it was just an indignity.

I slumped down, staring at my bandaged hands. I sniffled, flexing my fingers and feeling the dull ache. I'd been allowed to keep the wrist bands, at least. Clearly they could get away with manslaughter of dignity, but not murder.

There was a knock at the door. "Taylor," a woman called out. "Are you decent?"

"Yes," I answered.

A bulky woman, with a long, almost horse-like face entered. "Good evening. I'm Hannah." She even looked sympathetic when she said, "I understand it might feel bad to not be allowed to dress how you want. You're probably feeling kinda patronised and blue right now, yeah?"

"A little," I admitted.

"Well, that's just natural. There's a more flexible dress code allowed after you've got settled in, but at the moment, you're vulnerable. When we're sure you're not going to do anything silly, then there are more things you're allowed to wear."

I didn't feel very vulnerable, but I said nothing. I endured the patting down which checked that I wasn't hiding things on my person with what dignity I had left.

"Anyway," Hannah said, "I'm the point of contact for the Wilson rooms, which is where you'll be staying. It's a medium-term wing, so it's very unlikely you'll be here for more than a few months. There are five other girls in Wilson, and I'll introduce you to them later; we believe in mutual support here. If you have any problems, anything you'd like changed, then you just need to find me and I'll see what I can do. When we talk, it's confidential, and I'll only ever say anything to anyone else if I think you're really at risk. Okay? That's a promise."

"I understand," I said. Mutual support and other girls to talk to. How wonderful. I already wanted to leave. And faster than 'a few months'.

"I thought I'd show you to your room first and then I can show you around the place," she continued. "We can go over some of the rules and routines, and if your psychiatrist is free, I can introduce you to her. And also," the pager at her belt chimed, and she looked down. "Sorry, sorry," she said, going to check it.

"It's fine," I said.

She read the message, pursing her lips. "Okay, there's been a little change of plans," she said, eyes narrowed. "I can show you to your room, but then I'm needed somewhere. I'm sorry, this wasn't how things were meant to start, but…"

"It's fine," I said again, standing up.

"You can say more than two words at a time," she said with a forced smile.

"Oh." I supposed I hadn't been. I forced a fake smile. "I'm just feeling nervous."

"That's natural," she said. "Now, if you'll just come with me." I followed, trailed by someone who I mentally tagged as an orderly despite not being told what their actual job was.

My room for the immediate future was painted in a blandly inoffensive shade of pink. The windows were large, and only opened at the very top. The bed was built into the wall. The light fittings were likewise sealed into the room. There was a television, tucked into a locked cabinet which was bolted to the walls.

There were no sharp corners anywhere.

A perverse, impish instinct in my mind immediately started trying to work out a way to hurt myself with the things in here. Not that I wanted to. It was just a statement of rebellion. A silly one. I was going to be a good little girl and not scream at every last thing, and so I could go home. That was the plan.

"The staff will just be checking through your baggage," the orderly said in a bored tone, "and then it'll be delivered here. If you aren't trying to bring in any forbidden items, it shouldn't take too long."

"They said that books would be fine on the website," I asked, feeling a bit nervous. It looked like I was going to be bored here, and if I didn't have things to read, I might actually go crazy.

"Books are fine," she said, "as long as they're not on the restricted titles list."

Great. So who knew what kind of restrictions I'd be facing? I hadn't been able to find what was allowed and what was not on the website, so I'd just told dad to take a selection from my room.

An hour later, and Hannah hadn't returned. My baggage hadn't arrived either. I found the remote, and turned on the television, browsing through the channels until I found a news channel. There was some kind of PRT news conference going on. Apparently some villain called the Gatemaster had escaped from custody, and questions were being asked. Boring. Next channel. Something going on in Africa. Boring. Next channel. Aerial video of Florida Man chasing down a boat before headbutting the engine. Somewhat more interesting, but interrupted by an ad break.

With a sigh, I turned the television off. Had they forgotten about me already? Had _everyone vanished_? Was I in the empty, cold place I'd seen before I had been shut in the locker? Was this just a trap, a way to lure me back into there and… I took a deep breath.

No, that was just ridiculous. Settling down on my bed, I stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling. Why had I even agreed to do this? Oh yes. Because I was suffering flashbacks, having nightmares, had a constant fear of ending up in the locker again, and I was seeing things which weren't there.

Like right now. Even as I watched, the paint flaked off the ceiling to reveal the bare concrete covered in scribblings in who-knew-what. My heart beat like a drum, pounding in my chest. I wanted to scream, but bit down. I'm not crazy, I told myself, over and over again. I couldn't let them think I was crazy. Even if when I looked around, the television screen was cracked and broken and something had been scribbled on the protective screen in red lipstick. Everything just looked cold and bleak. At heart it was no different from a jail.

That wasn't the worst bit. There was a deep, red-black stain in the floor, all around the bed. And streaky handprints on the walls, in that same, morbid colour. And one on the window. Just looking at them made me feel awful. They felt like misery and death; they smelt like blood. The scent filled the room.

I felt sick. But I couldn't scream. I wouldn't let myself.

The bed was wet to the touch, cold clinging liquid seeping through my clothes. I sat up, arms protesting at the sudden movement, and the red-black oily liquid dripped from me. The bed was drenched. I was drenched. It was clinging to me and it wouldn't let go, seeping coldness right into my bones.

Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I was seeing things and I should just end it. I'd never have to go back to school again, never have to face the bullies, never have to put up with the shame and the way that people would talk about me behind my back.

No. I squared my jaw. There was something _external _about the way I felt. That wasn't me. Those weren't my thoughts. This was something else, thinking for me. I ground my teeth together, and closed my eyes, thinking of nothing else. If it wasn't gone when I opened my eyes, I would scream.

The scent faded. I opened my eyes to the sight of pink walls and an unbroken TV. There was no strange red-black oil anywhere.

I don't know what drove me to do what I did next. Curiosity, perhaps. Or just a refusal to let a little thing like waking hallucinations win. I can be very stubborn sometimes. But I thought of the strange rusted world, thought of the bitterly cold oil, thought of what I'd seen in the locker room, and let out a slow breath.

And before my eyes, the paint flaked away from the walls once again revealing the scrawls and handprints, and the scent of blood was back. I closed my eyes, and thought of nothing, and it was gone.

Huh.


	6. Chrysalis 1-06

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.06**

I woke in the morning feeling groggy, headachey, and more than a little sniffly. I was probably coming down with a cold. I was tired, of course, but that had been true for days. Realising I could control when I saw those waking dreams didn't make the nightmares of being in the locker go away.

Maybe it might in time. I certainly hoped it would.

Because if I was mad, there was at least method to my madness. I made sure of that last night, after the porter had delivered what possessions I'd been allowed in here and Hannah had poked her head in to apologise. I hadn't minded that she was needed because some other girl was having a 'crisis'. It gave me time to experiment.

Concentrating on that cold rusted place made me see it again, redecorating the world around me. Dripping red oil, rust and decay, cracks and ice. Even people were affected, if what had happened with my dad and the police officer was any indication. That was what must have happened at school, leaving it empty and turning Emma and the rest into demons. I really hoped that was the case.

More happily, I found that I could turn it off. By clearing my mind, deliberately thinking of nothing, I could return to the normal world. I went back and forth, again and again, each time terrified that it wouldn't work. It had worked this morning, too. I tried it just after waking up. It was almost like an addiction, now, each switch confirming I wasn't crazy.

I couldn't be crazy. Madness wouldn't be under my control like this. Mad people couldn't just decide to be sane again when they felt like it, could they?

That's what I wanted to believe, anyway, as I stared into this strange other place. Here, my room was a cell, bare concrete walls and cold floors. I tried not to look at the black-red oil which soaked my mattress, pooling beneath the bed or the angry marks in the walls, or… well, there weren't too many safe places to look, really. The small pile of books from home seemed normal, a small flash of colour and familiarity compared to the icy red bareness.

When I looked closer, though, I found that even my books weren't completely unchanged by the madness-vision. The colours weren't quite how they should be, and the less said about what had happened to the cover art, the better. I opened the top one, and was presented with the word

_LONELINESS_

written in block capitals on the inside jacket. In my handwriting. I hadn't written it there. Did I want to turn the page? See if there were any other alterations?

No, but I did anyway.

_CHAPTER 1:  
>MY LIFE IS A PRISON AND THIS IS THE WINDOW<br>THROUGH WHICH I WATCH THE BIRDS_

I closed the book quite firmly, and refocused my attention on the real world for good measure. I could check that I hadn't scribbled nonsense in capitals over the inside of the book, but I didn't feel like doing that right now. One thing at a time. I thought about getting dressed, and felt a bit stupid immediately afterwards. It was going to be pyjamas all day, every day while I was here.

Still.

Whatever had happened to me at school, I had control over it now. I could see things about the world which weren't obvious from the normal viewpoint. Clues and hints. Psychic impressions, maybe, left in that other place.

Wait, no. I should capitalise it. Capitalisation is important. The Other Place. It makes it sound more reasonable, in a sort of meaningful way. 'I can see into the Other Place'. 'The Other Place reveals its secrets to me'. 'Surrender, criminal, lest I show you the horrors of the Other Place'. Yes. That sounded a lot more like something I could say without sounding all pathetic and crazy.

Wait. Maybe I should translate it into another language. That'd make it even more impressive. Hmm. I would need to go check Google Translate and see how to say 'Other Place' or 'Other World' or something like that in a bunch of languages. Or maybe I'd need to get a dictionary out, because clearly older languages would sound even more impressive. Something like Latin or Greek or Aramaic.

They probably didn't have an English-to-Aramaic dictionary in the library in here, though. They might have English-to-Latin, though. Probably not.

So did that mean I was a cape? I guess it did. Sure, I didn't actually have a cape, and to all other perspectives I was a suicide-case in a mental health ward rather than a superhero. But some of the first capes were thought to be crazy, up until they started shooting laser beams from their eyes. If the past couple of weeks had taught me anything, it was how many things were just a matter of perspective.

It wasn't like they'd let me out, if I told the staff here. Oh great, Taylor. So you say you can see a crazy-sounding rusted world, and that's your superpower? Mmm hmm. Can you prove it?

Something told me that they probably wouldn't accept a 'trust me' on faith. Other girls had probably tried that too.

Even if I could prove I'd become a parahuman, that would just mean the whole hospital would know who I was. There was a reason most capes - the parahumans who did crime fighting and the like - kept their identity secret. A group called New Wave had gone public with their identities about ten years ago, and it hadn't gone too well for them. Sure, you had a fair amount of Thinkers and Tinkers who had various corporate or government jobs, but once your name was out, there was no way back.

All I could do was wait it out until they decided I wasn't going to throw myself off the edge of the Docks.

Until then, I'd have to spend my time experimenting more with my crazy-sight. Perhaps I could get some more control over it, so I didn't terrify myself every time my mind drifted. I'd also like to work out how much information it could give me. Sure, I could get some vague hints, but I hadn't needed to see him as a burning demon-thing to know my dad had been angry. 'Seeing into a nightmare world' wasn't the most glamorous of powers if it didn't do anything really useful.

The other thing that was worrying me was that demon-monster I'd seen there. Sure, that might just have been a twisted version of Emma and the rest, but I wasn't totally sure. I really hoped it didn't turn out that being able to see into the Other Place made monsters come after me. Was it actually another place I was seeing, with its own horrible inhabitants, or just my mind twisting what was there? I wasn't completely sure, so I decided to expect monsters until proven otherwise.

I had no idea how long I'd be in here, but at least I had a list of things to do. Keeping productive would hopefully stop me from actually going crazy.

1. Learn to better control my new power.  
>2. See if there were any really useful things that I could use it for, one way or another.<br>3. Don't get eaten by monsters that live in the Other Place.  
>3a. Find out if there were any monsters which live in the Other Place, as long as doing so doesn't break 3.<p>

After some thought, I added another four items to the mental list.

4. Have breakfast.  
>5. See if I could get some Tylenol for my headache.<br>5a. Make sure they didn't think I was trying to kill myself with it.  
>6. Convince people that I wasn't crazy.<br>7. Get started on that exercise regime I'd kept promising myself I'd do. It might help me run away from something which threatened 3, if nothing else.

A little bit of me understood that I was rationalising, breaking down my stress and horror into little pieces I could manage and contain. The rest of me didn't care what I was doing, so long as it helped me ignore the fact that I was in a mental hospital and probably wouldn't get out for weeks. At least.

I rubbed my eyes. I was feeling exhausted. I wouldn't go back to sleep, though. I turned on the television, which was still on a news channel. It was about half-seven, and the newsreader spent some time excitedly discussing some celebrity who'd been hospitalised overnight, before going into piece on poverty in New York.

Of course that's what the news cares about more. After all, it's not like a pop-star overdoses every day. It's more of a weekly thing. And everyone knows that poor people aren't news. They're olds.

The news wasn't going to stop me from falling asleep, so I instead considered my options. I could start seeing what I could do in here to try to keep fit. I couldn't do push-ups, or anything which would involve putting weight on my hands. That would hurt too much. There wasn't room to run, either. I could jog on the spot, but I was only wearing slippers and the floor was hard and cold. What else did people who exercised do which wouldn't involve my hands? Star-jumps? Sit-ups? I managed three of the latter, lying on the plastic-coated floor, before I collapsed down. My stomach muscles were aching and I was feeling limp.

Hopefully that was just a symptom of the cold I'd picked up. If I couldn't even manage four sit-ups, the time in a hospital bed had left me a mess. Maybe I should wait until I got better before trying to start this thing.

No. I wouldn't put it off. I had said I was going to start this, so I was going to do it. I managed two more, and forced myself to get up and stretch. Perhaps I should ask if there was a gym or something like that here next time I saw the supervisor, Hannah.

I suddenly shivered, ice cold creeping into my bones as the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. The sound of the television became muted and detached. I could still hear it perfectly clearly, but it now felt like it was a loud noise coming from a long way away. There was an iron hint of blood in every breath I took. I clenched my jaw and balled my hands into fists, feeling them ache.

I could feel the Other Place, feel it in the chill and in the ache in my hands. It was almost as if it was calling to me. It wanted me to look into it. Or maybe I wanted to look into it. I wasn't quite sure how I felt. Regardless, I tried to stay strong. I screwed my eyes shut, tried to keep my mind empty, and tried to not think of anything at all. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked.

There was something in the room with me. It wasn't a person. It wasn't even a mimicry of a person, like the empty doll that had replaced the cop. It was a white mist or smoke floating around where I'd put my books. It had a faint tinge to it – sometimes lavender, sometimes a very pale green or blue. It didn't look like it belonged in the grey and rust and black-red oil of the reflection of my room. And there was something inside the smoke. I could see glimpses of something moving in it.

It didn't look very human.

I squeaked, gulping in a breath, and fell over back onto my bed. Breath coming quickly, I tried to pretend to be calm. "Okay, l-looks like I'm too weak to do those s-sit ups," I stammered, trying to keep it in the corner of my eye. If I pretended I was just tired and hadn't seen it, maybe it would ignore me.

Was it alive? Aware? I wasn't sure. It had no face or features that I could see, so I couldn't tell if it was looking at me. It didn't move any closer to me or respond at all. I stared at it and watched it flow over my things. Outrage built in my heart, but that was dampened by the feeling of the cold, clinging black-red oil around my feet. Glancing up, I could see the marks on the walls creeping slowly. If you've seen honey ooze from a knife, you know what it looked like. Only this oil was moving along the walls, rather than down. It was twisting and twirling, like it was trying to spell something out, but I couldn't read it even if I'd wanted to.

There was _something _in my room. Something I couldn't see normally, something which made me feel cold even colder than usual in the Other Place.

I tried not to laugh at the television screen, which was still trying to show the news under the lipstick scribbled all over it. I don't know why, but I was finding that hilariously funny. It was probably that which brought me back from the edge of hysteria. Laughing madly at a news report on – I squinted – probably the weather wouldn't be too good for anyone listening in. It wasn't even like it was on a rollerskating hamster or something which was legitimately funny.

If I got into the habit of watching comedy channels I could get away with it, a cold part of my brain noted. And it also noted that I could hear noise outside the room, so I should just refocus on the real world and ignore the cold presence entirely.

I kind of wanted to hide my head under the covers. But I forced myself to ignore the Other Place, and walk towards the mist, like a girl perfectly innocently going to pick up one of her books and read it. Had the books faded in colour? I wasn't sure. No, it was probably just the light. It was morning now, and the light coming in through window suggested it was going to be a clearer day.

The cold feeling vanished before I even reached the impromptu library, and I peeked to confirm that the mist and the thing inside was gone too. It was. Picking up a randomly chosen book, I settled down on my bed and waited for the start of my first full day in a madhouse.


	7. Chrysalis 1-07

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.07**

"Coffee? Hot chocolate? It's only powdered stuff, I'm sorry."

I shrugged. "Hot chocolate," I said, crossing my legs and tucking my hands up into my sleeves. I was sitting in Hannah's office, waiting as she fussed over a kettle on the side. She had come to my room fairly early this morning, asking to see me in her office.

"Anyway, I thought we could get some of the basic paperwork and set-up things that I meant to do last night done now, so I can introduce you to the other girls in Wilson at breakfast," she said. She poured hot water into a pair of chipped mugs she had spooned granules into. "Breakfast starts at eight, and goes on until half-nine. Aaand..." she tapped at the computer, "okay, no messages. Where was I? So, how are you feeling this morning, Taylor?" she asked, putting the cup in front of me on the desk.

I decided honesty was the best recourse. It gave me more room to lie later if I was open now. "Bunged up and sniffly, and kind of headachey," I said. "I think I must have caught a cold in the hospital."

"We'll have to stop by the pharmacy to get you something for that later," she said. "But apart from that you're not feeling too bad? Are you homesick?"

I considered. "I don't think so," I said. "I mean, I was in hospital for a while before this, and-"I trailed off. I did miss my room. I did miss my dad. And I certainly missed not being in sterile cold hospital environments. "I would like to be home," I admitted, "but I'm not sure if that's homesickness."

"That's only natural," she said, as she poured three sachets of sweetener into her drink. "Yes, I'm terrible," she said with a wry smile when she saw me looking. She was clearly inviting me to share in her self-depreciation, and I smiled back. "They say that sweetener exists for people who don't like coffee," she added. "Me, I think I just like sweet things. Don't follow my example. It's terrible for you."

I peeked into her mug. Yes, she had black coffee, in case the smell hadn't been enough. She looked exhausted under the too-thick makeup, I thought critically. I wasn't getting proper sleep because of nightmares, but she looked barely better than I felt.

Her fingers clacked away on her keyboard as I considered my options. I took a sip of the watery hot chocolate, and made sure to swallow it. I carefully put my cup down on the desk in front of me. If I was going to do this, I would have to make sure I didn't scream or act strangely. I couldn't let what I was about to see affect me, not in front of a person who could have them thinking I was completely gaga.

I closed my eyes and concentrated.

"Tired?" she asked, her voice shifting to an unnatural rasp mid-way through.

Eyes still shut, I inhaled. The room smelt of stifling warmth and bitterness and just a tinge of rust. It was a relief, compared to the stink of blood that normally filled my nostrils whenever I did this.

"A bit tired," I said, trying to keep my voice level. "I haven't been sleeping well since… that. The thing that happened."

I opened my eyes a crack, ready to shut my eyes again if I needed to.

In the Other Place, she looked worse. Her skin was corpse-grey. It was torn in places, revealing raw flesh, while the bits which remained had the soft, shrivelled texture of an apple left in the sun for too long. Some kind of bone spike protruded from her ribcage, around where the heart should be, and something like old dried blood or rust crusted that entire side of her chest. Dark, waxy tar seeped from both eyes. What little hair remained dangled from her scalp in straggly clumps. She looked tired and diseased, she looked like she'd died but forgotten to stop moving, but above all she looked _old_.

"Is there, uh, somewhere I could exercise here?" I asked, trying to fight back a sudden nausea. "It's just, I'm feeling really out of shape after spending so much time being ill."

How old was she really? If the monster-selves I saw in the Other Place were linked in some way to the real person, then why would she appear so old and dead? I mean, my dad had been replaced by a burning figure, and he'd certainly been furious, and the cop probably hadn't really cared in the first place so it made sense she was a hollow doll. But what did this mean for her? Or was I reading it wrong?

I needed to find out more.

I relaxed, and let the paint creep back over the walls, concealing the burn marks and the graffiti. It was with no small relief that I looked back at the not-ancient-and-dead face of Hannah. She'd said something, I realised. "I'm sorry, what was that?" I said.

"I said, yes, there's a small gym which backs onto an exercise yard," she repeated. "There's also exercise sessions held, which you can sign up for. Are you feeling already? You just went a bit… vague."

"I just zoned out," I said, adding, "I'm just a bit tired."

"Do you have any preference to the gender of your psychologist?" Her fingers hovered apprehensively over her keyboard.

I thought. "I don't think so," I said.

She looked relieved. "Right, I'll put you down for Dr. Vanderburg , then. He has more free slots, so you'll be able to see him more and at the same time each day." She cleared her throat. "I don't know if you know, but we try to keep our patients on a proper schedule here. Just leaving people alone in their rooms doesn't help them get better. Obviously it's not as rigid as school, but it's still healthy to have a structure to the day. Do you see what I mean?"

I nodded. "Yes." I had ended up very bored in hospital. I coughed. "Are there any arrangements to let me keep up with schoolwork?" I sighed, my hands unconsciously going to my wrists. "Of course, considering everything, I'm not sure this place would trust me with a pencil."

I had made sure to keep my eyes on her expression, and she did wince slightly at that. She hastened to reassure me that there were systems in place to help me keep up with my education. Then followed a short talk, all about how I was here 'to get better' and how they were here to help me. I'd heard it before. More useful was the fact that I got a timetable. And then it was off to breakfast.

Walking down the corridors behind Hannah, I think I might have spent almost as much time looking at the Other Place as I did at my actual surroundings. I now had two worlds to explore when I got used to this place, even if one was pretty horrifying. I was also eager to experiment – this was the first chance I'd had to get a look at different places through the lens of my power. As far as I could tell, the geography of the Other Place seemed to mostly match up with the normal world. Variations were rare but noticeable, like walls that had been oddly warped or doors that were an entirely different shape.

I saw a door hanging off its hinges, and wondered what would happen if I tried to walk through it. How would I interact with something that was empty space in the Other Place, but solid wood in the real world? If I'd tried to touch my dad while he was that angry fire-thing, would I have burned? I didn't have a chance to test any of these ponderings. Hannah walked briskly, and I was only wearing the plimsoll-like shoes they'd given me.

There were butterflies painted on the walls of the canteen. It only made things look even more like a junior school. In the Other Place, the butterflies were still there, but they glowed. Luminescent paint sat on the bare concrete walls like oil on water, shimmering like an insect's carapace or a petrol spill. What made them so different from everything else?

The room was about half-full. I could only tell this with difficulty, because a thick multi-coloured mist hung around head height. It kind of looked like a psychedelic take on a seedy Prohibition bar from a film. An old film, too – the colours were mostly washed out. They flared vibrantly every so often, but only briefly and only out of the corner of my eye. It was vaguely nauseating. I suppressed a shudder at the sight of the monstrous forms that swirled through the mist, and let my sight return to normalcy. In the real world, the entire room was painted like it was outside, with a blue ceiling and high green 'grass' on the walls. The butterflies weren't the only animals, either. There were ladybirds and regular birds and a large cat.

I didn't like the cat. He was smiling, which made him look unhealthily like the Cheshire cat. That was an association I didn't want. My Wonderland was already less pleasant than Alice's.

Still, a little bit of me couldn't help but feel cheered up by the sight of the colour in the Other Place. At least the butterflies didn't radiate cloying cold despair like the black-red oil in my room, or make me feel sick like the coloured fog. They were a bit hopeful, if only in a watery, thin, weak way.

She led me over to a table where four other girls were seated. They all looked to be within a few years of my age. Clearly Wilson was a place of troubled pubescent girls. Hannah gave me a brittle smile. "Well, I'd hoped to introduce you to everyone yesterday," she said, "but Chloe can't be with us right now. Hopefully, she'll be well enough to see people soon," she pushed on, "so I'll just introduce you to everyone else for now . Good morning."

"Morning," said a mousy-haired girl, toying with her bowl of cereal with a plastic spoon.

"Samantha, Leah, Emily, Kirsty. This is Taylor," Hannah said, gesturing toward each of the girls in turn and then me. "She'll be in room five for a while. She just arrived yesterday evening."

"So where's Chloe?" one of them – Leah – asked. Too thin. That was my first thought. And my second, if you count 'anorexic' as being the same thought dressed up in more complicated words. Leah was pale, large-eyed, and looked like she could have been pretty if she wasn't doing her best to impersonate a twig.

"She's, uh, not going to be around for a while," Hannah said awkwardly. "She's going back to the hospital."

There was a painful silence. "But she'd seemed better," Samantha said, playing with one lank mousy brown lock with a finger. I noticed the fact that she was wearing similar wrist bands to me, and I noticed her noticing mine. "She said she was feeling better on the new meds."

"She'd had… she has bad reactions to some of that stuff," Emily said. She looked… well, there wasn't anything obviously wrong with her. "That just sucks. Shit. Is she going to be…"

Hannah bit her lip. "They think she'll pull through," she said. She sounded slightly guarded to me.

I'd been trying to hold off from paying too much attention to Kirsty, because she was a mess. There were puffy red scars on her hands and face – ones much deeper than mine. The ones on my face were just slightly pink, and the doctors had said that they'd fade. Hers – I thought someone had taken a knife to her, cutting deep into her cheeks and around the edge of her mouth, and they looked old enough that they were as good as they were going to get. She was shrinking away from me, and from what I could read of her expression she was staring at my hands and face. There was almost certainly a story there, and just as certainly I probably didn't want to know it. Hannah seemed to have noticed the way Kirsty was acting too, because she cleared her throat.

"But yes!" she said, with false brightness. "Everyone, Taylor. Taylor, everyone."

"Hi," I said awkwardly. I'd never been very good with first impressions, or any kind of impressions, really, and this was more difficult than most. How was I meant to talk to them? 'So, how are you crazy? Me, I get traumatic flashbacks and tried to kill myself when I got locked in a locker'. Wonderful conversational ice-breaker, I don't think.

"I hear voices when I don't take my meds," Emily said, rolling her eyes. "I'll let the others introduce themselves."

I worked my jaw silently before settling on an appropriate reply. "Um.".

"I would _slap _you if I wouldn't get in trouble for that," Samantha hissed at her. "Idiot. Call me Sam," she told me. "I mean that." She massaged the back of her neck. "Look what you did," she told Emily. "I was going to ask her about… like, what bands she likes and you've just gone and weirded her out."

"I don't really like bands," I said without thinking. That produced some smiles.

"Get used to being bored here, then," Leah advised. "If you get to like the radio stations the TVs pick up, it makes stuff much easier."

They looked rich, I noted to myself wryly. I wasn't entirely surprised. I'd picked up enough from my dad to guess that we couldn't have afforded to send me to a place like this if it wasn't for my school graciously footing the bill. We weren't exactly poor, but this place wouldn't be cheap, and only one person in the house was earning any money. The other girls here probably had more in common with Emma or Madison than me. That wasn't exactly fair to them, but I wasn't feeling too fair-minded right now.

I bit my lip, and mentally shook myself. No. I shouldn't think like that. Urgh, this was the most honest attempt at a normal conversation with a girl my age I'd had in _months_. I shouldn't go into this expecting them to target me. They had more than enough problems of their own. They were more likely to be the victims of girls like Emma and Sophia than part of their fanclub.

My eyes drifted over to Kirsty and those horrifying scars. She still hadn't said a word.

Did I want to know?

I concentrated, and shifted my senses to the Other Place. I really wished I hadn't. If Leah was too thin in reality, in the Other Place she was even worse. She had no eyes, no ears, nothing but a mouth which took up all the space where her face should be. Her skin was shockingly pale, stretched drum-tight over visible stick-bones and a stomach that bulged grotesquely. Her skull was monstrously oversized, and wobbled precariously on a neck as thin as a Coke bottle, like some terrifying bobblehead doll.

Samantha – Sam – looked more human, but her skin was split into patches of burned body and frozen flesh, greying ash falling from iced-over eye sockets. Even as I watched, the ice spread, creeping out from her slashed-open wrists. Emily twisted and thrashed when I wasn't looking at her. Her flesh crept and crawled in a way that reminded me of the locker and left me feeling sick. I thought I could hear whispers there, too.

It turns out I didn't want to know about Kirsty. I didn't want to know that of all the people in the room, she looked almost exactly the same in the Other Place. The same pale, flinching expression of worry about everyone and everything. The same livid scars. Only one thing had changed about her, and that was how her white pyjama top was stained with blood. They spelt out three words, stacked on top of each other.

_S IX  
>S IX<br>S IX_

Wow, I thought to myself in numbed shock. It's a good job you're not crazy, Taylor Hebert. A crazy person would freak out over someone who looked pretty normal in a freaky madness vision and had the Number of the Beast glaring out from her top. A crazy person would start pointing her finger at the girl sitting across from her and screaming about the Antichrist. A crazy person would start babbling. But that would be crazy. And so you won't do that, will you? Because you're not crazy.

It was just as well I'd drilled that into myself before looking into the Other Place. It was becoming my mantra, these days. I screwed my eyes shut again, thinking of nothing at all, and reminded myself that I was sane. When I looked around the table again, the world had joined me.

I really wished I had some nice clean Thinker power which just told me what I wanted to know without having to see these things. Were there any other parahumans who had powers like this? I would need to see if I could get internet access here. I needed to learn more about how powers worked, and see how other people used them.

Hannah tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you want to go and get some cereal? I just need to have a few words with Emily."

I drifted off towards the table where the little boxes of cereal and the milk were laid out, with a bulky woman watching over them. I was trying my best to avoid thinking of what I'd seen. I didn't want to slip into the Other Place again. I just needed some time. Time to think. But at least they'd tried to talk with me. And I was going to try to talk back. I wasn't going to run and hide. Hah. This was almost a fresh start, in a way. At least I'd be believed if anyone did bully me. And I'd be out of here fairly soon, so I just had to be pleasant enough.

A sudden thought struck me, as I was pouring out the milk, and I shivered. I hadn't really checked, had I?

What did _I _look like in the Other Place?


	8. Chrysalis 1-08

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.08**

I leant on the counter, staring at myself in the mirror. Whoever designed the ladies' bathrooms had focussed on making them easy to scrub rather than easy on the eyes, and they stank of chlorine, but at least they were clean. The harsh whiteness was a relief, in its way. It was a reassuring contrast to the dripping, stained and cracked surfaces of the last bathroom I'd been in, the first time I'd looked into the Other Place.

That relief was too shallow to really comfort me. I knew, now, how close that weirdness actually was. Detergent was no defence against it. The Other Place was out there, lurking behind my eyes. All it would take was for me to look into it and I'd see rot and filth and worse things all around me. My mind was already running through possibilities, wildly speculating about what I might see in this ever-so-clean bathroom, scrubbed down so carefully, so recently. What might some crazy person have done, here? Did I really want to see?

Yes, that was clearly why I was prevaricating. I wasn't just trying to chicken out of seeing what I looked like in the Other Place.

An older woman came out of one of the cubicles, and left without washing her hands. I shuddered in disgust, and then closed my eyes. Well, here went nothing. Time to see what I looked like in a mirror darkly. After a moment's hesitation, I shifted my head slightly, so I wasn't directly facing myself. It'd probably be better to ease myself in to looking at myself.

I cracked open my eyes and saw the lipstick scrawled on the mirror. That seemed to be one of the marker signs of the Other Place. I couldn't read the writing, if it even meant anything. Readying myself to turn, I took a deep breath and instantly gagged, tasting bile and the morning's cereal. The smell was indescribable. There was rot, death, sick, shit, ammonia, and that was just a small selection from the nasal cacophony. The once-white walls were encrusted with _organicness_, and black-red oil pooled on the floor in a shape like a chalk outline of a corpse. I could feel the misery and pain _radiating _from it like heat, and I shuddered, a horrible suspicion dawning on me as to what the red-black oil meant.

I shuddered, the meaning of the red-black oil dawning on me. Had someone died right here? Had someone killed themselves in _my room_? Or tried to? My skin crawled as I remembered how the black-red oil covered the bed and spilled down onto the floor. Did that mean they'd done it on the bed where I slept?

My stomach churned, and I dashed for a cubicle, retching into the toilet. I emptied about half of my breakfast into the bowl, which hardly made it any more filthy. Refocusing on the real world, which at least smelt more pleasant, I retched some more. The rest of my food stayed down, but I wasn't feeling too good.

Memo to self; in the future I would not use my powers in toilets. Not if I could avoid it.

It was probably just sheer stubborn spite which forced me back to the mirror, wiping my mouth. At least if I found out what I looked like here, I wouldn't need to do it again. Since I'd been sick already, I had less to throw up if I turned out to be a monster. I didn't think I'd looked very monstrous in the brief glance I got while gagging on my cereal.

This time, I held my nose, and looked straight ahead, avoiding the floor.

Again, the lipstick appeared from nowhere. Holding my breath, I peered at my reflection. A girl with lank, mussed curly brown hair and dark bags under her eyes gazed back. That was a relief, at least. I looked like myself. I breathed out a sign of relief, and regretted it. I coughed, spluttering on the stench, and the motion revealed the nasty-looking scab just under my collar.

My eyes widened, and I tugged the neck of my top down slightly. Yes, there was a big brown scab on the left side. And another one on the right. And several vicious ones on my arms and even my hands – my _unbandaged _hands. Running my hands down my front, I could feel more under my clothing. I must look like I'd fallen on broken-

Ah. The nails. Yes. I shuddered as I thought back to that agony. So in the Other Place, I was still scarred by what I'd done to get those insects out of me. That made sense. That had been the first time I'd seen the Other Place – when I had triggered.

But the thing was, as scabs, they looked about the right age. So did that mean that they were healing? That would be something to look for, I thought, peering closer at myself.

Wait a moment. My reflection wasn't fuzzy at all. I was short-sighted, and my eyesight was bad enough that it was more convenient for me to just wear glasses all the time, but they'd been taken away at the entrance. They counted as a potential hazard, apparently, so I had an appointment to get a pair of 'safety' glasses which probably wouldn't have the best lenses for me, but would do. Even without them, I could see perfectly well in the Other Place. I'd been walking around all day, switching between reality and the Other Place, and I hadn't noticed at all.

Right now, of course, I could have done with a bit of blurriness.

With a sigh of relief, I forced my senses back to reality. I permitted myself a small smile. I was getting the hang of it. I hadn't needed to close my eyes this time, I thought, rubbing my left collarbone where the scab had been. I could still almost feel it. And then pain spiked through my hands as my damaged fingers protested. That was something I hadn't missed.

Shaking my head, I went and flushed the toilet I'd been sick in, and went to wash my hands. I had been sweating. I should probably wash my face before I left. I could see to my hair at the same time, which was a mess. I promised myself that I wasn't going to sink into despair. I'd pay attention to my appearance while I was here. Not because I was vain, of course, but because if I looked normal and healthy and like I was caring about how I looked – but not too much – then the psychiatrists would have less reason to wrongly believe that I was suicidal.

I averted my eyes as I turned on the tap in the bathroom. I let it run and stared up at the ceiling, making sure I didn't catch the flow out of the corner of my eye. By the time I looked back, any rust there may have been in the water had long since gone, and I breathed out a sigh of relief.

Despite the fact that I'd put it to the warmest temperature I could, the flow was still lukewarm at best. That produced a spasm of worry, before I thought back to the school I'd gone to when I was a little girl. The taps there had never been able to run too hot either. I guessed this was another sign of how this place made us all into children.

So I'd promised myself I'd look pretty as well as shape up? Something told me that mental health wards would never take off as a makeover place, I thought, wincing as I tried to wash what bits of my hands I could without getting the dressings wet.

Then I went and told Hannah that I'd been sick. "It's just nerves, I think," I said, looking her straight in the eye and trying not to blink. "I sometimes get a bit queasy when I feel nervous." I swallowed. "Uh, and given what I just ate came back up, is there any toast or something like that? Something which doesn't have milk in it." I gave a wry smile. "I don't think I can face the taste again."

The toast was pretty good, and I ate four slices under Hannah's watchful eye which seemed to leave her satisfied. Oh, I realised. I hoped she didn't suspect I was bulimic. I should avoid going to the bathrooms for several hours, so she was satisfied I wasn't about to throw it up. It was possible she was just worried about the fact that I'd been ill, but acting in a way to minimise the chance that she might think I wasn't right in the head couldn't be a bad idea.

Well, in moderation. If I went too far, I might get paranoid about looking crazy, and that would only end in tears.

My first appointment with my assigned psychiatrist wasn't until the afternoon, and so I had a few hours to kill. I awkwardly and poorly tried to talk with the other girls in Wilson. It was a conversation which involved a lot of dancing around the point, but I did manage to find out what the protocol for getting internet access was. Sam also asked me if I wanted to come to one of the meditation classes which they ran.

"It's from eleven to twelve," she said, "and it's something to do. I mean, in a strict sense it's kinda boring, but it's a relaxing kind of boring. And I think it does kind of help. I mean, the breathing stuff helps you calm down when you get a bit wobbly, so that's worth it alone." Then she went off for blood tests, leaving me alone with Leah, who was reading a plain-covered book. She was very evasive about what it was about, and I didn't care enough to push her on its contents.

I entertained myself by reading a magazine left lying around, and put my name down for the meditation class and the waiting list for computer access. There was a long list of conditions and reminders that it was a privilege, not a right, and that our communications would be monitored, and so on and so forth. Well, I didn't care about that. I was almost certain that there would be an unrestricted wiki on parahumans out there. It wasn't like I was trying to look for anything objectionable. I just wanted information.

Damn. If only I had known Kirsty's surname. I could have googled it to see what might have come up about her. She had looked pretty normal, too. The fact that we both had shared scars raised my suspicions. Did she have similar powers to me? That'd certainly be something which might get someone winding up in an asylum, if she'd let people know she saw monsters everywhere. What if she had the same thing, but couldn't turn it off? I'd go crazy if that happened to me. Wait, no, I realised, they'd be tracking my search history here, and I'd probably face some hard questions if I started googling other girls' names. Well, I'd just remember it for when I got out of here and see what I could get from the others.

I got my printed out slip of paper with my sign-in name and password. It would give me thirty minutes, which wasn't all that long. It would have to do. I could already see why I should behave here. Even half an hour of internet access was a precious link to the outside world that could be easily revoked.

I did the thing which probably anyone who has ever triggered and wondered what their power could do does. Which is to say, I went and flicked through the summaries for the Triumvirate. They were the big three parahumans, the ones that everyone secretly – and not so secretly – wanted to be like. And the ones I was pretty sure I was nothing like. I wasn't like Legend or any of the other Legend-alikes. I couldn't fly, or project energy, or make forcefields or anything cool or flashy. Brockton Bay had New Wave, an entire team who pretty much all had powers like that. I remembered that I needed to see if I could find out who the white-glowing lady I'd seen from my hospital room was. Not now. Anyway, I could rule out being like that.

Then you had your Alexandria packages, like… uh, Alexandria, and the various 'knock-offs' out there, like Caestus Pacis, one of the second tier of Protectorate capes operating out of Washington DC along with Justice, who combined that with some kind of incendiary blaster skill. Then there was the lengthy disambiguation page for 'Heracles – see also Hercules' with about seven heroes listed, and some either self-aware or congenitally unimaginative Australian hero calling himself Superbrick. Oh, huh, no, he did in fact appear to be made of bricks, I realised when I found a picture of him. Weird.

I sighed. I certainly wasn't an Alexandria or Legend, given the fact I couldn't fly, punch down buildings, or fire lasers from my hands. And as for having powers like Eidolon's, and his capacity to do pretty much anything – I closed the tab, because it was depressing me. That wasn't the sensible way to get as much information as possible in thirty minutes, and I'd already used up five.

I went straight to the Classifications page, because that would be the fastest way to narrow down people with similar powers and what they could do. I was sure there probably were people out there who would say that you should learn how your powers work yourself and it's some kind of moral weakness to just try to find a list of everyone else whose powers sound even a little similar and then copy them, but they could shut up. They probably had nice easy powers which let them know immediately that they were super-strong, could fly, and were nearly invulnerable. They didn't have to put up with their main power being 'seeing things which weren't there'.

I could immediately rule out a bunch of classifications. Mover? No, I didn't seem to be physically better in any way. Blaster? No. Striker? No sign of contact-based powers. I could try seeing if I could show other people the Other Place by touching them, but that would only be a secondary power. Brute? Not a chance. Trump? How would I even tell? Tinker? No sign of any gifts with technology, and it didn't logically flow from what I knew I could do. Master? No indication of that, though in fairness the Other Place was a creepy hell dimension, and maybe I could make monsters as well as seeing them? On the other hand, maybe those monsters would eat me. That wasn't a field for experimentation without precautions.

Breaker, Shaker, Stranger or Changer? Maybe? The Other Place did seem to be sort of another world where things worked differently, and maybe, depending on how my power worked, I was changing how my eyes worked to be able to see it. They'd be a lower priority for experimentation, but they weren't out of the question. Maybe I could turn myself into a monster from the Other Place or step out of normal reality entirely – which meant I should also include Mover in my list of prospects and I _really _shouldn't even think a little bit of trying this in public. Not until I had confirmed that I wouldn't turn into some big-eyed spider-legged monster who'd terrify the other patients.

Aware of the fact that I was running low on time, I decided to focus on Thinkers. 'Often show abilities related to planning, information acquisition and cognitive or sensory enhancement,' the page on them said, and that fit the things I saw in the Other Place to a tee.

Unfortunately, there was a disgraceful lack of attention given to the capes with less impressi- more covert powers. Their wiki pages were much shorter, _and _usually came with fewer pictures. That didn't look good for any future cape career I might have. Didn't look like I would be getting my own action figure.

Probably for the best. What would it say when you pressed the button on its back? 'Someone died here?' Or maybe 'Everyone around me looks like monsters'. Maybe it would just scream, and then make an excuse about how it wasn't crazy.

Back in the here-and-now, of course, it meant that I had a lot less information to help me work out what my power did. I seemed to have some kind of... clairvoyance, I guessed the word was. Some kind of reading ability. I could see into the Other Place, and in the Other Place things were all allegorical. And also horrible. But in the Thinkers category, a lot more of the cape entries were stubs, and even the ones who had a proper page were very unhelpful.

Take Hourglass, a cape operating out of Miami and according to the wiki a known rival of Florida Man. He could stop time, and when time was stopped he was apparently frozen, but displayed 'cognitive and sensory enhancements including perception of short wavelength electromagnetic radiation and the ability to prepare actions in advance'. That didn't help at all when I was trying to work out what it was like being him. There was a fairly new cape marked as Thinker/Trump, called Flashside, who could apparently 'spontaneously develop new skills by minor alterations to her personal timeline'. How did it _feel_ to use that power? What were the limitations on what she could do? It made sense to not list these things online where anyone could get to them, but I _was_ anyone and I wanted to get to them. The villain entries were even less helpful. Another cape operating in Brockton Bay was a petty villain called Tattletale, whose power was just described as 'enhanced analytical ability'. That was it. I could understand the articles on criminals being shorter, but that was ridiculous compared to what the more overt villains like Lung got.

An untrusting mind might even suspect that the smart people – which was to say, the people whose power category was 'Thinker' – tended to give much fewer details about what they could and couldn't do. So, naturally I suspected that.

After much futile searching, I managed to find a half-way useful page on Psychometric Powers. That was the point when the timer ran out, and I was kicked off back to the login screen. I bit my lip in frustration, and then rose to let the next person on, who was already hovering behind me. Shaking my head, I checked the clock and went to get to a drink of water. The meditation session was in quarter of an hour, and – I yawned – my lack of sleep was catching up with me. I was probably going to fall asleep in the middle of it.

I would try not to, though. I needed to learn to calm my breathing and my everything else when I saw things that reminded me of the locker. If increased calmness helped me avoid panicking the next time the Other Place upped the ante on horribleness, all the better. I wasn't sure they really planned to help me get better at seeing things which other people would argue weren't there, but I'd take all the help I could get.

The man leading the group spent some time plugging in and setting up his CD player, and then put on slow, soft music. After dimming the lights, he began to explain in a soft voice how we should breathe – inhaling for a count, holding it, and then letting it out. The music and the dim lighting and the way he sounded really didn't help. Given how little sleep I had been getting, I was dozing off where I sat fairly quickly. I supposed that was a sign that I was relaxed, which meant the entire exercise was a partial success.

The sound of someone fidgeting behind me half-woke me, and I cracked an eye open. I'd noticed that some places were worse than others in the Other Place. The toilets and my room were awful, while the cafeteria hadn't been terrible. This room was calm, quiet, and everyone around me looked fairly relaxed. If I took a peek at its reflection, I could check my theory that the emotions that had been felt in a room affected how it appeared to me.

I didn't know why I kept on looking into that place, when so much of what I saw was disgusting or even made me physically ill. Simple curiosity wasn't enough, surely? Maybe it was just that I really wanted to be special. This thing, this talent was _mine_, and no one else could take it away.

Still, regardless of why, I focussed and thought of it. I was right. Yes, the walls were bare concrete, stripped of any paint, but that was all. There was almost no rust, and no blood or any of the black-red oil. A glance showed that my fellow attendees still had an edge of inhumanity to their features, but their monstrousness was muted, softened. Their calmness seemed to be influencing their appearance in the Other Place.

I frowned. That couldn't be right. Kirsty was the only other 'normal' person I'd seen in the Other Place, but she was clearly a nervous wreck and hadn't spoken a single word since I'd met her. She certainly wasn't right in the head. It didn't make sense that she looked normal when she _wasn't _normal. What was going on here?

At the front of the room, the man with wax-smoothed features sagging down his bones cleared his throat. "Remember," he repeated, a slight liquid quality the only thing that had changed about his voice in the Other Place, "cast away your problems. Don't think of them. Don't let them eat you up from the inside. Relax, and breathe."

Problems? I didn't have problems. But I'd learned to turn off my crazy-vision by emptying my mind. Maybe calm emptiness would be the best state of mind to try doing something more involved with the Other Place. Just something small, simple – that would be all I would need. I focussed on my breathing, and folded my hands in my lap. Breathe in. Breathe out. Be calm, Taylor. You just want to see if you can change things in the Other Place. Sure, part of that's because you read the article on Shakers and thought that sounded really cool, but that's not important right now. Breathe and focus.

I sneezed once, twice, and there was suddenly something inside and outside and separate and the same and countless other feelings I couldn't describe. But when I looked up, there was someone, something standing in front of me.

I swallowed hard.

The _thing _looked… well, it looked like me. That was the only way to describe it. But it was a me wrought in taffy, and stretched and drawn by the whims of a bored and sugar-hyped child. Fingers almost as long as forearms trailed along the floor, touching and feeling everything. An elongated nose – mine wasn't anywhere near that big! – sniffed the air. And two eyes the size of grapefruits bulged out of her warped skull, dilated pupils trying to stare at everything and anything.

And despite that, she still looked like me. And she sounded like me, breathed like me as she leaned in, snuffling. A finger that felt like an insect feeling out the shape of my face stroked my cheek, leaving my hair standing on end.

A whimper escaped my lips. I tried to suppress the noise, and stared at the monster, eyes watering.

It snuffled, and looked away from me. Half-drifting, as if it was suspended from strings, it picked its way across the floor to the nearest person on the next mat over. It reached out with its long fingers, and stroked her cheek. And then it snuffled again, nostrils flaring.

What had I just done? What was that thing? I clenched my jaw, and thought of nothing. But no, that wouldn't work! If I thought of nothing, I wouldn't be able to see the Other Place, and if I couldn't see the Other Place, I couldn't see if the thing was still there. Helplessly, I watched as it with almost child-like glee put both hands on Sam's head. What was it doing?

"No!" I blurted out loud, and it stopped, staring at me with its too-large eyes. "Don't! I mean it!"

The not-me spectre came apart like mist, which came rolling back in towards me. I inhaled sharply, and it crept in with the breath. I didn't breathe out, but there was no sign of anything else. I sighed in relief, and focussed back on the real world.

Everyone was staring at me.


	9. Chrysalis 1-09

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.09**

The ceiling fan spun lazily, a faint whine in the cluttered office. Every free surface was stacked with folders and loose sheaths of paper, and the old dented filing cabinets were bulging. The curtains of the ground-floor office were wide open, letting in the grey wintery light. My psychiatrist was looking at me questioningly, his pen hovering over his notepad.

"Oh, that?" I winced, an expression which hurt in itself. I had to stop doing that. You would think I'd have learned that the scabs on my face didn't like being moved, but apparently not. "I just dozed off in the meditation. And… well, I told you already that I was having nightmares, so-" I shrugged, trying to not look too affected. "Yes."

My assigned psychiatrist, whose desk declared he was called Dr. Erwin Vanderburg, nodded. "Well, that's understandable," he said, carefully, making a note on the paper before him. He had a faint accent, which I couldn't recognise. "And, mmm, you would say this has been going on for less than two weeks?"

"Less than two. I wasn't having nightmares before, because the painkillers I was on meant I wasn't dreaming." I shrugged. "Or didn't remember it, which is just as good."

"Yes, you mentioned that earlier," he said. "Hmm. Well, at the moment, after only one meeting I'm not prepared to prescribe you medication. I try to deal with things without immediately resorting to it." He tapped one finger against his lip. "We'll see how you're doing tomorrow, and whether you're feeling any better about being here. If you're still very nervous, or are sick again, we might look towards a short course of a very mild sedative. Just to help you get over the initial acclimation period to the new environment, and to calm those nerves." He smiled at me. "After all, if you're being sick because of homesickness, you're going to be feeling pretty miserable, right?"

"I suppose so," I said, trying to sound – well, I didn't know what the best emotion to convey was. I didn't want to sound enthusiastic, because who on earth sounded enthusiastic in here, but sounding reluctant or annoyed would just have him thinking I wasn't being cooperative. As a result, it just ended up coming out in a flat monotone. That probably wasn't the best, but it was done.

"I'm here to help you, Taylor," he said. "I can understand that you don't necessarily want to open up to me, but it'll be easier for both of us if you don't clam up whenever I try to engage with you. I'm on your side, remember?"

Well, that was a not-too-veiled threat, I thought darkly. Who would say that unless they wanted to raise the prospect of what would happen if he was not on my side?

"After all," he added, "considering some of the behaviour in your report... I'm talking about the incident with the nurse here, so-"

"To be fair," I said, blushing slightly, "that wasn't deliberate. I was having a nightmare and when I got woken up, I thought that the nurse was part of the dream. I just tried to-" I cleared my throat, "uh, stop her dragging me back to the locker."

"Yes, Taylor," he said, with almost insulting patience, "but you also headbutted her while screaming incoherently."

"I didn't mean to!" I protested. "I said sorry afterwards!" It was very unfair. When you're waking up from a nightmare, you shouldn't be held responsible for what you do. Especially if – as had been the case – what I now knew to be the Other Place had been bleeding into my dreams and the waking world.

Of course, I couldn't admit that in public, so I was just having to take my lumps for something which really hadn't been my fault.

"And as long as it doesn't happen again, everything will be fine. Especially for all the people who aren't being headbutted," he said, smiling at the last remark. He made another note on the paper before him, and then rose. He offered me his hand, and I shook it, not entirely sure why.

"Well, it was very nice meeting you for the first time, Taylor," he said. "I hope we can get along and you'll feel more comfortable opening up to me later. I can tell that you don't want to be in here, and that's entirely understandable. There are worse places out there, but no one in their right mind would want to be in a psychiatric hospital."

I couldn't help but smile, and that produced a slightly wry grin from him. "That's the first smile I've got out of you all the session," he said. "Your sense of humour's a bit dark, isn't it?"

"I think you're better suited as a psychiatrist than a comedian," I told him.

"Touché. Well, uh…" he leaned back to check a calendar, "I'll have a schedule sent to your room for our meetings. I'm sorry, everything's a bit of a mess at the moment for the schedules due to one thing and another, but we should be able to hopefully meet at the same time each day. How does that sound?"

"Okay, I think," I said, adding, "Thank you."

"Well, okay then," he said, leading me to the door. "You're heading for lunch?"

"Yes," I said.

"Lucky you," he said. "I've got to prep some paperwork for a meeting this afternoon, so I'm eating at my desk. But some other time, we should have lunch together. Maybe you'll be able to relax better if I'm away from my desk and this more formal environment, yeah?"

'No', I didn't say. Having someone trying to be nice to me to get me to tell me things is the worst possible way to get me to trust them. Some of the other girls had been nicer to me before the winter break, which had surprised me a bit at the time because some of them had been in Madison's circle of friends. Now looking back, of course, it was clearly just something to get me to let my guard down. Maybe they'd been in on it too, or maybe one of the three had just asked them to do it as a favour.

"That might be nice," I said out loud.

It didn't matter. I would prefer that he didn't try to get friendly and we stayed purely professional, all things considered.

And because I had been a good girl throughout the entire chat and hadn't looked into the Other Place once – mostly because I didn't want to freak myself out and so get him suspicious – I looked back. Like Orpheus, I couldn't resist the urge to see what was behind me. Unlike Orpheus, of course, I wasn't rescuing my wife, and no one had actually told me not to look back with the threat of dire consequences. And also I wasn't a brilliant musician. So perhaps I wasn't much like him.

Regardless of my similarities or lack thereof to mythological figures, though, I risked a glance to see what the psychiatrist and his cramped office looked like in the Other Place.

Eight eyes blinked back at me above a fixed smiling face, and his six hands rested on the desk. Tendrils of pale silk bound him to his desk and hung from the ceiling. There were indistinct shapes wriggling in wrapped bundles, and I shuddered at the sight of them. I didn't know what they were, but they hovered at the edge of familiarity. Either way, I wanted out of the room, and I turned and wandered down the rusted corridors, headed for the cafeteria.

So, I thought, passing a morbidly obese woman whose flesh rippled and crawled, tiny hands and feet pressing against it from the inside. Let's look at what that might mean. Spider? Yes, certainly he's a spider in some way, if that represents something about him. A predator? Lazy, willing to wait and so do nothing? But he's trapped in his own webs in some way, I thought. That much seemed to be clear. Even if everything else wasn't.

I stepped around a patch of oil-black water, dripping down from the walls and ceiling. It looked deeper than it should have been. Was there a hole in the floor in the Other Place there? What would happen if I stepped in the puddle?

Urgh! Why couldn't my power tell me things in nice and simple ways? Why did it have to wrap things up in metaphor? I bet most Thinkers got to just_know _what their power told them, not have to piece it together from symbolism. I should start doing the crossword. It'd be training.

Still, it was a warning. I should be on by guard around him – preferably without letting him know that I didn't trust him. A spider-man couldn't be a good sign. Maybe I could see if I could talk to Hannah and see if another one would have any space to see me. But what if they were worse?

Why was I using it so much? I really couldn't say myself. There was a bit of me – and not a small bit, either – which really didn't want to see the horrible things I saw there. I didn't want to see the filth in the toilets, the strange black-red oil on my bed, or how there were all these monstrous renditions of the normal-looking people just an eye-blink away. And then there had been the thing in the meditation session. Could I make monsters from my own mind? It seemed like it. That should be enough to warn off any normal, reasonable person. But I kept on doing it.

It was probably because now I _knew _about the Other Place, it was always going to be there. At the back of my mind, I knew it existed, and closing my eyes to it wouldn't work. Everyone – apart from me and Kirsty, I wasn't sure what was going on with her – seemed to have a monster inside them. The world was always so close to being filthy and horrific. And certainly, that seemed to fit pretty well with what I'd found at school, and… well, my dad did have a temper. Which, I reminded myself, he tried to control. Even if the Other Place stripped people to their core, people could try to change themselves. They didn't need to act like the monsters the Other Place showed them as.

That was something, at least.

Maybe I should go stare at the butterflies in the cafeteria for a while. At least they were beautiful. And I could get some food there, I reminded myself, stomach grumbling. I had thrown up most of breakfast, after all.

I ate quickly. The macaroni-and-cheese was overcooked, but at least it was filling. I'm sure the sticky, stuffed feeling would go away in time. No one else sat at my table, so I was free to stare at the beautiful butterflies on the wall in the Other Place, ignoring the rainbow mist, the rust and the monsters around me. And at least in the Other Place, the macaroni was just grey and flavourless, which made it taste slightly more palatable. It certainly didn't have the too-strong aftertaste of the normal version.

Hmm. I made a mental node of that. Taste was another sense which was different for me when I was looking into the Other Place. Except I really couldn't just call it 'looking', could I? It covered touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smell. It was a full sensory thing.

I was going to call it 'seeing', though, because there wasn't really a good word for 'all my senses experience it, but I'm not physically there'. It's not something the English language evolved to deal with.

Probably not any other languages, come to think of it.

Having eaten, I went back to my room. I had to think. I also had to be alone. Not just because I thought best without other people around me, being distracting, but also because I was going to see if I could do anything else with that strange not-me I had made during the meditation session. It probably wasn't a good idea to do that around other people. I didn't know what it had been going to do to Samantha, and until I knew what it was, I didn't want to find out. I had to find out what I could do and if I could control it. If freaky mind things were going to escape from me – I don't even know what I'd do. I'd _have _to tell people. It would be wrong otherwise. But until then, I wasn't going to breathe a word about it, and part of being not-crazy was not taking stupid risks.

Plus, the whole not 'freaking out in front of people and making them think I was crazy' thing was useful.

I can't say I didn't close the door behind me with a sigh of relief. I couldn't lock it, though, because the doors didn't have locks on the inside, and I couldn't even wedge something in the way because the door opened outwards. Not that I would have, of course. I was just innocently practicing the meditation. Just feeling a little homesick. No other reason. Certainly not experimenting with parahuman powers, no sir, not me.

Getting in the right frame of mind was hard. I couldn't sit on the bed, because the bed was where the probably-death reddish black oil was. But the bed was the only comfortable place to sit in the room, because there weren't any chairs. I tried perching on one of the counters, but that was no good. In the end, I wound up on the floor, sitting on one of my pillows.

But physical comfort was the least of my concerns. I had been relaxed, bored, even kind of curious when I had made that thing last time. Right now? I was on edge. I didn't want to see it again, but I did, and all the time I was worrying about what would happen if I managed. Matters were only made worse by the unpleasant full feeling I had sitting in my stomach from lunch.

I eventually turned on the television, flicking through the stations until I found some old timey radio station playing classical music. That would do to help me relax, I thought.

Turns out, classical music sounds really freaky when you're in the Other Place. Or at least this music did. Quite apart from the waves of static which pulsed through the speakers and the fact that the entire piece had both sped up in tempo and shifted to a minor key, the woman singing sounded on the edge of tears.

"Help me," she pleaded in between tracks. "I'm stuck in here."

I changed channels pretty quickly, to some boringly slow folk music that, while still afflicted by static, at least didn't have radio people begging to be let out.

Focus, Taylor, focus. Keep yourself together. And yes, perhaps later I would go through all the radio stations and see if mysterious radio people begging for aid was a common thing. If the Other Place showed something hidden about the world – well, that said something not very pleasant about the station or that track, or possibly the radio itself. But that would come later.

I just had to do what I'd done this morning again. I just had to try to change the Other Place, keeping an open mind. I'd started out not being able to control whether I saw the Other Place, and now I could. So I should be able to control if I made creatures or not. I had to learn control.

"Control," I whispered to myself, breathing in and out. My legs were going numb in this crossed position, but I wouldn't let myself think of that.

I exhaled, and a dark shape flowed out from my mouth and nose. I blinked, trying to clear watering eyes, and looked up into the face of a newly made monster.

The creature this time was different. It was more human than the last one, and bore more of a resemblance to me, but its expression was locked in a permanent rictus of terror. The figure wore a dirty red smock, stained with God only knew what. Its wounded, pale hands covered its eyes – no, I realised, the hands were fused with the flesh – and I could not shake the feeling that it was watching me with its wide-open, silently-screaming mouth.

It exhaled, and its breath smelt like the locker.

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God. Why had I done this? My heart was beating like a drum in my ears and the warped, too-slow folk music was playing in the background. I tried to jump away from it, and realised too late that my legs were crossed. All I managed to do was fall over backwards, tumbling back onto the cold floor. Fear gripped every thought, an iron hand clenched around my gut. Mindlessly, I flailed back, scrabbling.

It smelt of the locker. It was going to eat me alive and then drag me back there. It was all because I'd been a fool and not told anyone and it was all my fault and I was going to die here except no I wouldn't die because there were worse things out there like the locker and the fear radiating off it was a palpable force and-

No.

"Stop," I whispered through dry lips. I willed it to stop. I imagined it bound up in chains, unable to move unless I permitted it to. If I had made it, I would control it. I _had _to. Otherwise it would take me back and _I wouldn't let it_.

Just for a moment, pain spiked from my fingers as if I'd just had a red-hot spike driven into each nail. This turned out to be not very metaphorical at all, because before my pain-greyed vision I saw ten glowing chains force their way out of my fingertips. Biting down on my lip, I tried my best not to scream. Hissing like freshly quenched steel, the chains wrapped around the eyeless figure, trussing it up tightly.

Despite the pain in my hands, I scrabbled backwards until my back collided with the wall. I gasped for air. The figure didn't move. Couldn't move, I realised, looking more closely. It was bound up in black iron, which seemed to pulse with my heartbeat. Iron which had come from my hands, I realised, staring down at my fingers. They looked inflamed, reddened, but they didn't look like they'd just been torn open.

Quickly, I flickered back to the normal way of looking at things. They were still bandaged there, and there didn't seem to be any fresh blood or other symptoms that red-hot chains had used them as an exit point. I also couldn't see the bound monster, which probably wasn't a good idea, so I returned to the Other Place.

Heart pounding, gasping for breath, I pulled myself to my feet. The creature was locked in place, bound by the living chains – which I was beginning to realise were the same order of thing as the creature – and so I could see it more clearly.

Now it was constrained, I could feel that not all of the fear I had been feeling had been my own. Or perhaps it had, but it had been fear I had put into making the creature. I had been scared of what my powers were going to do, scared of what I would do if I could do it again – or if I couldn't do it again – and so I had made something which caused fear. Yes. That made sense, and by the symbolic logic of the Other Place – well, it looked like me, but it was covering its eyes with its hands.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I'd made a monster from my own fear of my powers. Which meant that it would make people scared of my powers. Hmm. Or possibly scared of their own powers. I would need to-

No. I wouldn't check that. That would be a stupid thing to check. I'd find something much less alarming and traumatic to test that sort of thing. I'd rushed into this twice, and I'd only just worked out how to control the things. Maybe 'opening my mind' wasn't the way to get controllable creatures. And the chains had come from my fingers, the same fingers I'd torn open trying to claw out the caterpillars. Maybe they were a minion I'd made from that same feeling of 'I'm not going to lie down and give in'.

So. That meant I was a Thinker and a Master. Sensory things from the Other Place and the ability to make minion-constructs which I could now control. Hopefully. I tried thinking _really _hard about making the thing – Noeyes, I was going to call it Noeyes – walk over to the door. I was rather surprised when it did so, the chain-wrapped creature stumbling to where I wanted it to go.

Okay. _That _was kind of cool. I could control the things I made, at least once I'd… uh, got them under control. I didn't even have to give them explicit orders. I just had to think about it, and they'd do it. Just to make sure it wasn't premature to declare that I had the thing under control, I made it move around the room, and then for good measure, dance for me.

Noeyes wasn't very good at dancing. Maybe the heavy iron chains binding it had something to do with that.

Next step, I thought to myself, taking a deep breath. "Return," I whispered. Wait, was that the right phrasing? "Come back. Reabsorb. Stop existing. Get back in my head."

One of those commands worked – unless it was a matter of just wanting it gone – and so Noeyes came apart into a black tarry mist, which rushed into my lungs in a forced gasp. Strangely, it didn't taste of anything, but it left my lips and tongue feeling momentarily numb. It was like I'd just taken a large mouthful of ice cream, but without the cold or the ice cream – which as a simile could probably do with some work.

But that annoyance was lost beneath the glee I was feeling. Glee and relief. I wasn't a threat to other people. I didn't have to live my life worried that if I lost control, I might make a monster which I couldn't get rid of. I could try and find out if I could do something directly useful without having to worry that I might unleash something.

I looked around wildly, dismissing the Other Place so I could slump down on my bed without having to lie in the oil. The television was playing a cheerful bit of folk music in the background, and that just about matched my mood. I was still flooded with adrenaline from the fear and that combined with the glee felt amazing. I stuffed my forearm into my mouth, trying to muffle the sound of my giggling.

I sat bolt upright, swinging my legs off the bed, and almost reflexively opening my eyes to the Other Place.

What if I could affect things in the normal world? I'd need something which could – I looked around – yes, something which could pick up that book over there, and bring it to me. This time I'd make a creature which wouldn't need to be wrapped up in chains, which I would control from the offset. I closed my eyes, imagining the shape it would take. It would need hands, and it would probably fly because I didn't want to have to imagine legs, so I'd give it wings, and it's not like I needed to give it a real face or anything, because it would just have to go pick up a book. And it would come with the chains already around it, so it'd do what I said from the start. I gritted my teeth, focussed, and exhaled, feeling smoke escape from between my lips and from my nose.

I opened my eyes, and hovering before me in the Other Place was the thing I had visualised. I boggled slightly at the sight, because in my mind's eye it hadn't looked quite so – I reached for a word. Yes, 'freaky' would do. In retrospect, I wasn't sure why a creepy faceless china doll with rust-red butterfly wings and no legs had been a good idea. Still, it had hands, and I wouldn't have to imagine it walking, so perhaps it might work.

I'd get better with practice. And it wasn't like other people would see them, anyway. Fetch, I thought at the winged doll.

It tore itself apart in a cloud of bloody mist, reappeared by the book, and seized it in both hands. It lifted it up and flickered back to my position, depositing the book in my lap before dispersing.

Well. I had _meant _it to fly over, pick up the book, and carry it open. But, I thought, staring out the window of my Other room to the misty outside, I was totally fine with being able to make teleporting doll-things. That probably meant that if people couldn't see the Other Place, the book had just vanished and reappeared in my hands.

Considering what had actually moved the book, that was probably for the best.

But still! I had a power which wasn't just seeing horrible things! I could also make… um, horrible constructs! And – I grinned widely to myself – it seemed like I might be rather flexible in what I could make them do. I knew they could stir up emotions, as I'd been hit by fear from that one I'd wrapped in chains, and that they could also move physical objects. To someone who couldn't see them, those two powers would look totally unrelated. What else could I do? Sure, from what I'd read up on the classifications, I was a Master and a Thinker, but those were pretty broad categories. And when I had a better grasp on the range of things I could do…

My thoughts were interrupted by a sharp knock on my door.


	10. Chrysalis 1-10

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chapter 1.10**

I froze.

The knock at the door came again.

Almost reflexively, I sunk onto the Other Place, and stared around the room. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Well, out of the ordinary by the standards of a twisted bare-concrete-and-rust madness dimension, at least. I could see it was hazy, or possibly misty on the other side of the dirty glass of the window, but nothing was staring in at me.

I should probably answer the door, then.

Perhaps it was the men in black, come to recruit me into a sinister conspiracy which found unnoticed parahumans and used them as secret deep cover assets away from the public eye. I was about to be whirled away into a world of intrigue and politicking, and would also coincidentally get to leave Winslow and get secret agent tutors who would teach me everything I needed to know for my new role. And so would never see Emma, Madison or Sophia again.

Though the men in black would probably actually also be the women in black, because any sinister conspiracy which only recruited men was probably not too interested in me.

And was also pretty stupid for passing over half the population, so I wouldn't want to be a member anyway.

I opened the door outwards, and came face to face with a horrifying walking corpse which seemed both frozen and burned. I flinched and gasped, and then remembered that I was still seeing the Other Place.

That was probably a bad habit. Forgetting that I was still looking into a twisted version of the real world where everything was decayed and horrifying was, all things considered, something I shouldn't be doing. I should see if I could find a way to only see it with one eye at a time, or see both it and the real world at the same time, or something like that.

Returning to normalcy, I saw the person at the door was, in fact, Sam. She was almost certainly not a secret agent for the New World Order or whoever your cabal _de jour _was. Even if – I inwardly sighed – she would probably look better in a black suit and mirrored sunglasses than I would. We might have both had scabs on our wrists, but she didn't have marks on her face and was prettier than me on top of that.

She was also looking at me funny.

"I'm a little… uh, jumpy," I said, biting my top lip. "Sorry."

"Yeah, I saw you freak out in meditation," she said, shrugging. She had her thumbs hooked in the waistband of her bottoms. "Uh…"

"I haven't been sleeping well, and I dozed off because it was all quiet and I had a nightmare," I said, quickly. Perhaps a little too quickly.

"I wasn't actually asking that," she said, flicking her head. The motion seemed more appropriate for someone with longer hair, and looking more closely I could see that her short cut was a little rough around the edges. "I was actually going to ask – well, the rest of us are hanging out in the rec room. Are you doing anything?"

Well, I'm making monsters with my mind which only exist physically in a creepy hell-place which exists parallel to the normal world, I didn't say. Sorry about the one which almost attacked you in the meditation class – oh, did I not mention that? "Sure, nothing really," I said. "Just reading."

Sam rolled her eyes. "Oh, you're another one of those ones," she said. "Come on, then."

It turned out that one of the rooms along our corridor was actually a rec room, with sofas, a television in a protective cabinet, and some old magazines stacked in a corner. The walls were a clearly-chosen-to-be-calming shade of blue, and the plaster was cracked up near the top. Sam collapsed down next to Leah, while I took a seat next to Emily. Kirsty wasn't present.

"… but telenovelas are funny!" Emily insisted, continuing the conversation I'd heard on the way here. "So much overacting!"

"You're the only one who speaks any Spanish," Leah said, her head resting on the soft arm of the sofa.

"Not enough to understand them," Emily said cheerfully. She flashed an impudent grin at me. "Taylor, yeah? Come on, we should totally watch one and make up our own dialogue for it! It'd be even better than knowing what was going on!"

"Uh," I began intelligently. Of all the things which I had expected someone to say to me, that hadn't been one of them. Emily looked younger than me, and was certainly acting that way. "What's going on?"

"Sam and Em are arguing over what to watch," Leah said, yawning. "I think Sam must've gone off to grab you to get support or something. I don't really care. I'm so bored I'm okay with anything."

"You could at least have backed me up," Sam said accusingly.

"Could have, but that would have taken effort," she retorted.

"You're a terrible friend," Sam said, lips twisting into a pout.

Something flashed across Leah's face, too fast for me to catch it. She covered it with a frown. "Look, I see you're trying to get me to throw a cushion at you, but I'm not going to fall for it! They're mine!"

"So terrible," Sam said, shaking her head. "Anyway!" she began, flicking through the channels. "Today, we have a choice of Emily's Spanish thing that no one understands, an episode of some historical drama thing where… uh, the women are all running around in petticoats, something which seems to involve men in suits in Las Vegas, adverts, more ads, music channel, music channel, _country _music station… okay, I think we've gone into the radio stuff." She started heading back down the channels.

"The petticoats thing can't be too terrible," I suggested. I thought I recognised it as one of the endless stream of Pride and Prejudice remakes, and it might have been one of the better ones.

"Seconded," Leah said quickly. "Wasn't that Jane Eyre?"

Oh, apparently it was, we found after watching a few minutes of it.

"Is it always this… boring?" I asked, after a suitable period.

"Stupid historical dramas? Yeah," Emily said, a little sulkily.

"No," I said, waving my hand. "I mean all this. Like, at the moment, we're just being left alone and," I shrugged. "I guess I never really thought about what happened in here until-"

"… until you wound up here, yeah," Sam said. "Same here."

"I think it might be because none of us are really severe," Leah said. "Like… well, I know we're all going to be out of here soon?" she turned it into a question, glancing at me.

"Yeah," I said. That surprised me. Or were they not counting Kirsty? She wasn't here. Maybe she had an appointment or something. Or was sitting in her room as I had been. She probably wasn't making monsters with her mind, though, I thought and shivered. "Just being watched because," I held up my wrists, silently. "But it just seems dull. I don't think the books I took with me will last weeks."

"Oh, thank goodness!" Leah said, perking up. "Someone else with books! I'll trade you for anything. I've been bored out of my mind. I ran out of new books _weeks _ago and the library here is trash."

"You also ran out of my books," Sam drawled.

"You only brought three, and I'd read two of them already. You barely count as a book-source," Leah said playfully, prodding her in the arm. "You're totally inadequate as a bastion of bookishness. Your literary lack is legion. Your wordliness is… um, woeful. Your… text-ness is terrible. And so on and so forth because I'm running out of alliteration."

"Text-ness?" I asked. I couldn't have stopped myself for a million do… okay, I could have stopped myself for a million dollars. But I couldn't have stopped myself for – like, ten or so.

"Leah has caught worditis," Sam said. "It may be terminal."

"I've had it for years," Leah said dismissively, flapping a hand. "Have you read anything by Claire Golding? I don't suppose you have her new book with you?"

I shook my head. "Sorry," I said. "I got it for Christmas, but I already finished it, so I didn't bring it."

Leah crossed her arms. "Damn," she said. "Well, what did you think of it, anyway?"

"Not her strongest," I admitted. That was putting it lightly. It had been a chore to get through the second half of the book. Sarah had spent most of the time feeling sorry for herself. I didn't read books to follow people moping about how they couldn't change their situation. I got enough of that in real life. "I think she's losing her edge. The Falling Petals wasn't great, either."

She frowned at me, too-thin lips pursing. "Really? I liked The Falling Petals. I think it was certainly stronger than Leftmore Willows. Have you read any Umberto Eco?"

"Is that an author or a series?" I asked.

"That would be a 'no', then," she said. "I'd lend you one of his ones in return for any books you have, but they didn't let me bring in 'In the Name of the Rose'." She smiled, wrapping her arms around herself. "I guess the Diabolicals really are everywhere."

I didn't get it.

"Ignore her," Sam said. "Hit her with a rolled up newspaper if you really can't stand the constant references to books." She sighed. "Someone got the paper in the café this morning before me. I'm feeling news deprived. When this is over, can we go to a news channel and see what's happening outside these walls?"

It was strange, sitting there with them. Not because I was sitting around in my pyjamas with three other girls I barely knew, watching a drama. No, it was strange because it somehow managed to feel comfortable. Leah and I talked quietly for a bit about books, and I found out that my musical tastes had almost nothing in common with either Sam.

I'd almost forgotten where I was, when a bleeping went off Emily excused herself, to return with a paper cup of water. She shuddered as she swallowed some pills. "The aftertaste is yuck," she said, pulling a face, drinking more water. "Worse than the last lot. They put you on anything yet, Taylor?"

"Not yet," I said. "I think they mentioned sleeping things, though. But," I sighed, shoulders slumping, "I guess I don't like the idea of having to take pills."

There seemed be a lot of sighing going on. It wasn't a surprise. The air here tasted a little stale, in its medicinal clinicalness.

Emily shrugged. "It's not like it's a big deal," she said. "I'm just in here for a few weeks while they switch my meds." She rolled her eyes. "_Again_. Which means I wind up here while they phase me over and keep an eye on me while the new lot builds up in my system or however the hell it works. I just hope this new lot doesn't make me feel as sick. And, you know, actually works all the time. Like, I was totally glad that the last lot didn't work properly, because it made me feel like shit all the time and honestly? I was feeling so bad that being crazy didn't sound like such a bad deal." She shook her head. "So, what, do you lot know each other already?"

I blinked. "Huh?"

Leah looked me up and down. "I don't think I've seen her at school," she said to Sam. "Arcadia?" she asked me.

I shook my head. "Winslow," I admitted. And it was an admission, even as this confirmed my suspicions about them. Arcadia High was the other big school, on the other side of town. It was the nice school, with the expensive facilities and the brand new swimming pool and presumably even teachers who gave a damn, if their budget stretched that far. Winslow was not the nice school.

"Ah," Sam said, stretching out before curling her legs up on the sofa. "Makes sense that you didn't look familiar." She sighed. "This is my first time in this place," she said, folding her arms. "Worst. Christmas. Ever."

"I got wobbly in the run-up to Christmas because I wanted to let myself pig out a bit over the holidays, but I was over my target weight and so I-" Leah screwed her eyes shut. "No. I was stupid and made everyone worried and," she sighed, "ruined everyone's Christmas. And I got everyone at school another talk about the dangers of being too thin, so I'm probably going to get stick for it."

"There are a lot of them," Sam said.

"Really?" I asked, raising my eyebrows. I hadn't thought of that. I thought everything would be better at Arcadia, and said that.

"Could we not talk about it?" Leah said quietly. I hastily apologised, feeling like a brute. I didn't want to talk about why I was here, so why would other people?

"I'm home-schooled," Emily said, with a sigh. "My mum doesn't trust the schools because she's with the Movement. Like, even before my head got funny, she was all 'they won't teach you the right things' and 'they'll just mean you come into contact with the wrong sort of boys' and things like that. And now she's also all 'if you went to school, the stress would make your condition worse'."

I have to say, at least to me home-schooling sounded kind of appealing, and said as much.

"Trust me," Emily said darkly. "It isn't."

An hour or so passed peacefully, before the tannoy went off.

"Taylor Hebert, you have a telephone call at Reception. Telephone call for Taylor Hebert."

I excused myself, and headed straight there. There was only one person who was really likely to call me. Sitting down on the cushioned chair by the telephone, I took the call.

"Taylor?" asked my Dad. "Hello. How're you holding up?"

"Dad," I said warmly. "I'm… I'm doing good, I think."

We talked for a while. It was good to hear from him. I'd only seen him yesterday, but it seemed much, much longer. In the time since he'd dropped me off, I'd worked out how to control my powers and how to see into the Other Place, and also how to make and control the creepy monsters. I'm not sure that was what they'd meant when they said that the psychiatric hospital would help me, but the boredom did seem to be giving me reason to improve. We talked of nice, cheery, mundane things, and I told him that I'd met the girls in the same section and they seemed nice and the woman who looked after us and she was nice and my psychiatrist and he was nice and everything was… nice. Although…

"Dad," I asked. "Why are you calling now? Shouldn't you be at work?"

"Everyone got sent home early today," he said, sighing. "There's another Movement march tonight, and the police are busy cordoning off the area and clearing the place. The company shifted shifts around, so I'll be working this weekend. No one wants anyone around the place when everything's tense after last week."

I inhaled sharply. "What happened last week?" I asked. "Dad? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Taylor. It's not really important so-"

"Dad, they're shutting down the place for a march," I said, trying to keep my voice down. "That's not something that isn't important."

"A mob went for one of the workers' buses over at Filkmore, and… well, they were immigrant workers and there were some deaths," he said reluctantly. "On both sides. And there have been more attacks. I'm… well, you shouldn't be worrying about it. I'm fine, and the police should have everything in hand. Don't think about it, Taylor."

"I have a lot of time to think," I said. "I'm bored more than anything at the moment. Though," I cleared my throat, "I talked with my psychiatrist – I said I met him, yes. He was nice, and he doesn't think I need pills at the moment." That wasn't quite true, because he just said he didn't want to put me on them yet, quite apart from the fact that he was a monstrous spider-man in the Other Place, but that was what Dad would want to hear. "So we're going to just be talking for now."

"That's good, that's good. And talking about talking, Taylor, I think you should-" he began, and trailed off. He paused. "Why didn't you tell me about Emma?" he asked, slowly and painfully.

I paled. I was glad I was sitting down because my legs felt like jelly. "Tell you what?" I managed, knuckles whitening around the telephone.

"I know, Taylor. I found out from the cops," he said. "I… I meant to only ask you once you were back home, but the conversation just led into it and then I was sure that if I didn't ask you now, I never would."

I sighed. "I thought it was just a falling out at first," I said, trying to move away from the topic. He didn't need to know everything. "Maybe she was upset because we didn't go to summer camp together, I don't know. Maybe that was it. I sometimes wonder if I said something to her which… which I don't even remember, but really hurt her. But she'd met new friends and didn't want anything to do with me and," I swallowed, "that hurt. But we'd fallen out before, and I thought if I just… waited out, we'd be friends again. And then… she didn't try to be friends again. I don't know. Maybe I did get her angry in some way. And things had got better before Christmas! She wasn't talking to me, but she wasn't doing bad stuff."

"You should have told me," he said.

"It was girl stuff," I protested. "And," I paused, "if I'd told someone, I was afraid they'd just get worse because I'd be a tattletale."

"How did you manage to keep it quiet since last summer?" he asked.

I took a deep breath. "Summer before last," I said weakly. "Oh-nine."

There was an awkward silence. "Is… is there anything else you want to tell me?" he asked. I could hear the distress in his voice, knew how horrible he must be feeling, and my heart went out to him. I really wanted to tell him, I really did. About what I was seeing. About what I could do.

I could tell him everything. I could talk to him. I could join the local Wards, the group which looked after young parahumans, and they could get me moved to Arcadia, where all the other Wards supposedly went. The Protectorate, the US government cape organisation, hired every parahuman they could find. If you didn't want to be paramilitary or your skills weren't right for it; why, there were lots of civilian fields you could work in. There were Thinkers on all kinds of committees in the federal government, Tinkers kept society working, and… well, they were the most employable ones, if you didn't want to go for the military or join a Parahuman Response Team.

I could do things. Make things better. I wouldn't even go out and fight crime, because I was a Thinker, and even before I worked out what I could do with those strange projections in the Other Place, I was pretty sure I had a psychometric power. I could be… like, some kind of psychic cop-assistant, investigating crime scenes and telling people 'He didn't die here. The body was moved'.

That was depressing, in its own way. I mean, yes, sure, I'd be helping people, solving crimes and helping find killers. But that would mean I'd spend every day at school not letting people know what I was – all the Wards were capes, parahumans who concealed their identities – which seemed to be to be a very lonely life. Working day and night with people who you could never go off duty with, never show your face, never let them really know you.

And if I was using my powers to solve crimes, it would certainly be something which would mean I couldn't go maskless, even when I was old enough to leave. A Tinker who just worked on making those new 'smartphones' could be just another person, but an investigator who could solve crimes no one else could would be a target. No wonder so many people ended up working directly in the Protectorate, where you could relax with other people like you. The mask and cape – usually not literally a cape nowadays – set you apart.

I didn't want that. I'd spent the past year with no real friends, and the idea of my adult life being like that was soulcrushing. Maybe – maybe when I was out of here, I'd go look at the Wards, see what they were like. If they could get me away from Winslow, it would be worth it. But it'd be a big step. Once I told the Protectorate and they'd confirmed it, I'd be on record. Even if I turned down the offer, which you could do, and went back to my normal life, things wouldn't be the same. What if some supervillain stole the list of names? They might try to hurt me or Dad – or try to recruit me and threaten Dad to get me to work for them.

I wouldn't let Dad get hurt because of me. He was safer off not knowing. Not until I was sure that was what I wanted to do.

I could think about it later. Pretty sad, how trying not to get depressed about how the world sucked and I now at least had something which would guarantee me a job as an adult had just managed to lead into further dark thoughts. Wonder if that was a special Thinker power in its own right? The ability to find the downside of any given situation?

Or maybe I was just feeling blue because I didn't want to be here at all. Hearing him speak, hearing him upset because he'd obviously found out about what had been going on from the police or something, and had been bottling it up, not saying anything while I was in hospital – I wiped my suddenly runny eyes.

"I miss you," I said in a choked voice. "I want to be home."

"And I want you to be home, kiddo," he said, his voice breaking up too. "Just… just concentrate on getting well, okay? Don't think about school or anything. I promise, I won't bring it up again. Just… just please please _please _talk to your therapist person or whatever the professional term for it is. When you're out of that place, everything's going to change, I promise."

"Okay," I said faintly. I couldn't see how he could promise that, but I wanted to believe it so hard.

"I'll call you tomorrow, okay? Every day. I said I would, and I will. I love you."

"Thank you," I whispered. "I love you too."

After an awkward bit where neither of us really wanted to put down the phone or hang up, we managed to mutually stumble towards ending the call. I put the phone back on its hook, and sighed.

"Was that your dad?" one of the nurses said, coming over to shoo me away from the seat by the phone.

"Yes," I said, blotting my eyes on my sleeves. "Just feeling a bit homesick now."

"Poor girl," she said warmly. "Still, it looked like you were enjoying talking to him at first. That's nice. It's good to have family. Too many people here don't get any calls at all."

And I could even have believed her platitudes, if I hadn't checked the Other Place, and seen her corpulent, bloated form, which pulsed and trembled with every heartbeat. I had no idea what that meant, but somehow it made her words ring hollow. I made my way back to the rec room in Wilson, and slumped down, hugging a pillow.

That night, I dreamed that I was being torn apart. That I was fractured and broken within the rusty iron locker, surrounded by dead caterpillars, and everything that made me _me _was seeping through the cracks in my mind and body. My life crawled away from me, along with my mind, and I scrabbled in the filth and grime, trying to pull them back into me. I was a porcelain doll in a cold dead universe which hated me, and I was bleeding out.

I reached out, and wilfully impaled my hand on one of the spikes which was already slick with my own blood. The nail-stigmata piercing my flesh, I broke it off, and screamed as I stabbed the life trying to escape me. I pinned it to the ground, and it wriggled, like a trapped insect. I had to get it back in me. I had to.

I woke in the Other Place, whimpering to myself. There was iron growing on the walls, coating the bare concrete like a scab. I was sinking into the red-black oil, and it was sinking into me. It smelt of the locker. Panicking, flailing, I managed to return to normalcy, and lay in this dark room – God, I wanted to be home again, back in my own bedroom! – curled into a ball on the bed.

In the end, I managed to cry myself back to sleep, and didn't dream again.


	11. Chrysalis 1-0x: Ten of Wands

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Chrysalis 1.x **

**Ten of Wands**

A damp, cold clinging chill permeated the city, painting halos around every light and leaving the pavements slightly slick to the foot. It had been raining earlier, and it felt like it was going to rain again tonight. Stepping out of the 24-7, Jamelia Chriswell shivered and tugged her jacket around her. Breath steaming in the winter air, she headed back to the car.

"It is goddamn _freezing _out there. Gotta be in the twenties," she complained to her partner, clambering into the car and dropping an energy drink in his lap. She dropped the carrier bag in her footwell. "Nice and pre-chilled for you."

Her fellow officer grinned up at her. "You're a life saver," Robert said, breaking the seal and chugging it. He winced. "Urgh. I hate working nights."

"Join the club," she said, fastening her seatbelt. Outside, a few cars were passing along the late night streets, but the sidewalks were nearly empty. Only a few stragglers were out in the cold and wet. No one sensible wanted to be outside when the weather was like this.

"I mean, I don't even like how this crap tastes, but I need it to keep awake," he continued, taking another mouthful.

She peered at the dashboard. "Yeah, I knew it. Twenty-six outside." She shook her head. "I hope those Patriot idiots are freezing. The overtime'll be nice post-Christmas, but couldn't they have found a warmer night to get everyone called up? Anything come in over the radio when I was out?" Jamelia asked, looking around over the parking lot. She blew on her hands, and held them over the heating grills.

"Disturbance over on Twenty-Fourth and Clayton," Robert said, running a hand over his short-cropped hair. "Low priority, but I said we'd check it out." He winked. "Said you were dealing with someone who wanted to complain that someone's dog had pissed against his car."

"Har-de-har," she said, fastening up her seatbelt. She took a thankful bite into a chocolate bar, and swallowed. "Okay, then," she said. "Did they say what it was?"

"Sounds like a few old drunks setting fire to a car," Rob said, starting the engine.

"At least it'll be warm there," Jamelia said.

"Hah. We can hope. They're probably just doing it to be taken in to the nice warm cells."

She shivered, running her fingers through her hair. "Kinda get where they'd be coming from."

The police car pulled smoothly out of the parking lot, onto the damp streets of Brockton Bay. They drove down, headed towards their destination. This was far from the worst part of the city, but it certainly wasn't the best either. The way one might describe it was 'tired'. Paint flaked from buildings which had been decorated in better days, and periodic patches of darkness interrupted the sodium glow of the street lamps, vandalism or ill-repair leaving a light extinguished.

From behind the barred windows of electronics shops, cathode rays blared into the night's darkness. There weren't any rare, expensive flatscreens on display. Those products of parahuman-run factories would be locked up safely, if those shops even had any to sell. They probably didn't. Such consumer goods only appeared in the elite boutiques on the Boardwalk, and this was definitely not the Boardwalk.

In the distance, the roar of a crowd could be heard. The Patriotic rally. There was a certain pattern to it, a distinct cadence. It would rise and fall, almost like the waves which washed the dirty decaying port to the east.

"At least it doesn't sound like open war has broken out," Robert said jokingly, eyes loitering for a moment at the warmth of a Chinese take-out shop. The owner caught his eye for a moment, looking welcoming, but he continued on.

Jamelia grunted.

On Nineteenth, a gaggle of uniformed twenty-somethings staggered down the sidewalk arm in arm. They were singing, loudly and drunkenly. Some of them were carrying brown paper bags which obviously had alcohol in them; others had carrier bags filled with mixers and snacks. Even as the two police officers watched, one of the women threw up into the street, to jeers and cheers alike.

"Want to do anything?" Jamelia asked, nose wrinkling.

"What, against that many drunk soldiers? Not on your life," Robert said heatedly. "Just tell control about them and let the Army deal with their drunks."

"Yeah, best all around," she replied, reaching out for her handset. "Control, this is Chriswell. We have approximately fifteen – that is, one-five – 390s heading south-east along Nineteenth… currently at the intersection with Brameer. Look like they're Army. Can you 10-5 this to their base and tell them to go pick up their drunks? We don't have the manpower to handle them and are currently on the way to a disturbance on Twenty-Fourth and Clayton."

"10-4, Chriswell," came back the crackly voice over the old radio. "Please stand by." There was a pause. "Okay, will do. Continue on your current assignment. Army will be notified."

The car continued along its way, leaving them behind them. "They're not bad kids, probably," Robert said, the traffic lights painting his face red. "We're all young once."

"I didn't say anything," Jamelia said.

"My kid brother's signed up. So did I, before I came here. Only job we could get. No wonder they go a little wild. It's probably the first time in their life they've had spare cash to burn. I know I did some dumb things when I was in the army."

"They're a bunch of drunk idiots. So much for our last line of defence. It's a waste of taxpayer money. They're being paid to do pretty much nothing, just in case an Endbringer shows up."

"Heh. Probably going to get hell from their officers," Robert said, grinning paternalistically. "We used to get hell whenever someone in our platoon gets picked up from town on charges. That's gotta be… what, three squads?" He accelerated away from the lights. "They're prob'ly gonna wish we picked them up. They'll be scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush for that. Hell, for that many, they'll be finding all-new messes for them to clean."

They sat in silence for a while, as shops gave way to cheap office space and rented buildings. It started raining lightly. To their left, a truck was being loaded by tired-looking Asian women parked in front of an industrial-scale laundry. The lights were still on in several of the office blocks, and Jamelia wondered for a moment what they were doing in there so late, when half the city seemed to be deserted because of the rally. But whatever they were doing in there, they were doing it quietly and not-obviously-illegally, so it wasn't her problem.

No, her problem was straight ahead. Three burning cars sat in an otherwise empty parking lot, ablaze. The street lights had been broken and the windows of one of the buildings next to the lot were boarded up, so the fires were the main source of light. Hooded youths were gathered around the fire, warming themselves. There were discarded things which looked like both spray and beer cans around them. More importantly, a prone shape – a body? – lay just at the edge of the fire light.

They looked like gang members.

"Control, we have three 11-24s, vehicles are on fire," she said into her handset. "Possible Code Purple. Multiple 10-66s around vehicles, I can see six. They're wearing hoodies, can't see any masks on them. I think there's a person on the ground. Could just be drunk, but we're going to check."

"10-24. Play it safe, Chriswell."

"10-24, Control," Jamelia put her handset down, and found Robert staring at her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It's probably nothing," he said awkwardly. "They're a bunch of gangers who set some abandoned cars on fire in the cold. And there's a bunch of them and they look like maybe E88ers. Can't we just ignore this? Go for something that matters."

Her eyes widened. "It's someone who's totally out of it at best. And they're _skinheads_," she said in contempt. "What if that's some poor kid who just happened to run across six of them?"

"It's probably just one of them drunk after setting the car on fire," he grumbled, unfastening his seatbelt nonetheless and checking his pistol. "If you're wrong about this, you owe me something warm and full of sugar."

Outside, a fine drizzle continued to sleet down from the skies, keeping the floor slick and visibility poor and sapping all warmth from anyone exposed. The weather was getting worse, but honest, proper rain would be better than this undecided downpour, almost closer to mist than rain. In the distance, a car alarm wailed. The two cops turned on their flashlights. Raindrops danced in the beams.

"Hey!" Robert yelled out, letting his flashlight sweep over the scene. There were chalk markings on the ground around the cars, although in the rain and in the glare of the fires, they were obscured. "What's going on here?"

"Fuck off!" one of the hooded figures yelled back. That one sounded young and female.

"It's the cops!" another one said, this time male.

"I don't care if it's the fucking queen of England," the woman –the girl – retorted. "She can fuck off too."

"Who's that on the ground?" Jamelia shouted, squeezing her pistol tightly. There was a bit of her which wished she had more range time. There were six gangers and if it came down to violence – her stomach clenched, and the shake in her arm made her flashlight dance. She didn't want to die.

One of them made an oinking sound, and her knuckles whitened. She forced herself to breathe. To stay calm. "Who's that?" she asked again, her light pooled over the prone figure.

"Just one of us, piggy!" the loud-mouthed girl shouted back. "Go off and hassle some actual criminals."

"Like those slanty chinks down towards the docks," another one called out. "They're all criminals anyway. We're just keeping the place safe from those shits."

Grumbling, though, the youths dispersed into the darkness. Advancing, she checked the prone figure. Up close, she could see it was a Asian man, with blood running from an open cut on his forehead. He looked bruised and battered, and had a prominent black eye. She raised an eyebrow at her partner.

Robert looked vaguely embarrassed, but shrugged.

Despite his injuries, the victim was conscious. "They gone?" he asked. "I not move and they stop kicking, but…"

"Yes, they've gone," she said.

With a wince, he pulled himself to his feet, and immediately doubled over, groaning. Between the two of them, the two cops managed to lead the man back to the car.

"Okay, sir, we're just going to have to check you to see how hurt you are. Can you tell me your name?" Jamelia said, while her partner talked to the control centre.

"Jim Lee," he replied with a strong accent, sitting in the car out of the rain.

"And your current address?"

"11003 Seventeenth. I live in Flat 21c."

She noted that down. He seemed responsive, and didn't seem confused. "Are you married? Do you have children?"

"Not married. Not anymore. One daughter, lives with ex-wife."

"What is your daughter's name?"

"She called Xiulan."

"Can you advise if we have an 11-40?" her radio asked.

His eyes were responsive and dilated normally when she shone the light in them. He was bleeding from his scalp, but it looked like a shallow cut. "Do you want us to call for an ambulance?" she asked the man.

"No. No, I fine," he answered. "No ambulance need for me. They set fire to my car! Take my wallet! Go arrest them!"

"11-42, according to the victim. No signs of a concussion," she said, a tad dubiously. "Mr Lee, are you sure that you don't…"

"Fine!"

"Confirmed that the victim doesn't want an ambulance," she said into her radio.

Robert approached her. "I'll take his statement," he said. "You check the scene."

"It's wet out there," she said.

"Yes?" He shrugged. "Heads or tails?"

"Heads."

It was tails.

Grumbling, Jamelia headed back out into the cold and wet. At least it was warm around the cars, and as long as she kept upwind she didn't have to breathe in the fumes. The falling water hissed as it touched the hot metal of the burning vehicles, and she swept her eyes and flashlight over the nearby buildings.

A stylised shape was painted in white onto the abandoned office block that backed onto the parking lot, fresher than the rest of the graffiti that tattooed it. It suggested a little girl holding a red balloon, and sprayed under it was-

RIP ENID EMILTON

-in crude capital letters.

Jamelia's nose wrinkled in contempt.

Three years ago or so, there had been a nasty incident where the five year-old daughter of a prominent figure in the Patriot Movement had been killed in a fight between Chinese and Japanese gangers. It hadn't been a political thing. She'd just been caught in the crossfire and hit by a stray bullet. It happened.

Except most of the children caught in random crossfires weren't so pretty, blonde and photogenic, didn't have parents who had lots of Movement contacts and press support and _certainly_ weren't such a convenient martyr.

Come to mention it, almost all children who died in such a manner didn't have the initials 'EE' leading to local skinheads taking her as a cause celebre, either.

She shook her head in disgust. It was pretty clear what had happened here. Some poor bastard got beat up, his car set on fire, and now this graffiti? Yeah. It was just another bubble in a city which was set to boil. She'd been on the scene when that mob had set on those Asian workers down at the docks, where people had died. And a week ago, Lung, the parahuman leader of the Bomei, burned down several warehouses in the docks owned by companies linked to the Empire-88 and the Iron Eagles. And then there had been the shootings, up in the northern parts of the city…

The gangers here had been looking for revenge.

She doubted that the skinheads here had even known that the man they'd attacked had been Chinese, rather than Japanese. They probably thought every Asian in the city went around as part of one big gang, if they cared that much. Jamelia had worked the street beat long enough to know that it was laughable that the Chinese-Americans who made up the White Lion Association and the local branch of the 14K Triad would want anything to do with the first generation Japanese refugees who named their gang for their 'exile'.

She worked her way along the wall. More gang graffiti. Most of it looked recent, and it was all done in a similar style. There was that recurring runic theme these racist groups seemed to love, tugged straight off the front cover of a heavy metal album. Some of it was actually pretty artistic, by the standards of some of the crap she'd seen scrawled on walls, which suggested they'd had time to work here.

She reached the edge of the building, where it led over to the next lot and a still-active building, and glanced down the alleyway which separated the two. The other building had been freshly painted in the past few months, but had still managed to gather a thinner layer of spray-paint. Patches of off-grey marked areas where some of the larger or more obnoxious gang marks had been painted over.

Trash cans littered the narrow alleyway, their contents split over the ground. The entire place smelt vile, and she was just about to go when something caught her eye.

There seemed to be a shape lying behind one of the overturned bins. It just caught the light for a moment, but its shape brought dreadful imaginings to mind. Jamelia swallowed, and shone her flashlight over it again. Yes, it looked sort of like a body. In a bag.

The rain was getting heavier. The buildings on one side of the alleyway were only a single storey, and the rain bounced off the metal roof, making a racket which drowned out the noise of the city.

"Rob," she said into her radio, holding her flashlight between her shoulder and cheek, "back me up. I've got something suspicious here."

He arrived, and a little bit of her took schadenfreude in the fact that he, too, was now out in this heavy rain. "Look," she said. "There."

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I see it."

Side by side, they advanced, lights dancing over the graffiti-covered walls and the filthy floor. There, a split-open bag disgorged used condoms and old razors; here, old broken beer bottles lay in gleaming piles. It seemed like this alley had been used for tipping junk from the entire block. Those empty noodle cartons looked like they'd come all the way from the Vietnamese takeaway they'd seen on the way in.

"Hey, is that door open?" Robert asked, shining his light at the fire escape of the open building. It was slightly ajar, propped open with some trash. It didn't look like it had been broken into.

"Sucks to be them," Jamelia said, trying not to breathe too deeply. Stepping closer, she swallowed, the scent of rotten meat so strong she could taste it in the back of her throat. There was a dark stain around the suspicious bag, a leak from some small tear in its black plastic. Reaching out, she nudged it with her foot.

Like a dam breaking, it split open entirely in a flood of half-cooked noodles and raw chicken. Maggots crawled in the rot and filth, squirming in the sudden brightness.

Jamelia gagged, but mixed with revulsion was relief. It was just a normal black bag filled with normal trash. No body. It had been nothing but a trick of dim light and overstrained plastic. She laughed nervously to herself. She was just jumpy.

"Shit, that stinks!" Rob said, snorting nervously along with her. "Wow. That… fuck, I thought it was… man, don't scare me like that."

Something fell on his head, and he flinched. Feathers drifted down from above.

Jamelia flinched back in instinctual shock, and then blanched as the thing in the pool of light made itself clear. The half-eaten pigeon stared up at her, its dead eyes wide open and its organs spilling out. She looked up in slow horror, and caught sight of the dark shape on the low roof. Something black and horrific and utterly inhuman lurked in the shadows. A single drop of drool drooped down from its mouth, and splashed at the edge of the light, steaming in the cold.

It growled, a deep bass rumble that shook the guts. It was not a very loud growl. It didn't need to be. It was coming from a mouth which could swallow a man's head whole.

"What the fuck!" the man beside her snapped, scrabbling to draw his pistol. In the rain, he lost his grip on the handle, and it went flying. The clatter in the filth of the alley was almost lost.

Jamelia simply froze. The canine, reptilian shape was much bigger, much _more _than any real animal should be. There was something about its teeth, which glinted in the low light, which screamed to her that if she stopped moving, she might survive. And there was something almost _human _about the way its arms bent. Something handlike about the claws that grasped the edge of the tin roof.

The next minute was a gap in her memory. One that started with adrenaline and panic, and ended with her sprawling in a filthy, soaking-wet alleyway. She'd lost sight of Robert, but she'd also lost sight of that thing. Groggily, she pulled herself to her feet, and noticed she'd kept hold of her handgun.

She'd emptied it.

She didn't remember firing it. She slotted in a fresh magazine, and worked the slide.

"There she is!" she heard a young-sounding voice shout, and she whirled.

And everything went black.

It was somehow darker than a powercut. It was a darkness which went beyond a lack of light, a darkness which numbed every sense. Jamelia screamed and didn't even hear her own voice. Pistol in hand, she opened fire wildly on instinct. She couldn't hear the bark of her weapon, or see the flashes. All she felt was the reassuring kick. It was the only thing which told her the rest of the world still existed. And then it stopped kicking and she was left in nothingness.

Something hit her, hard, in the stomach. She flailed in the darkness, trying to protect herself, but whatever it was grabbed her wrist, spun her around, and kneed her in the small of the back. Red pain danced across her vision, and she was almost glad of it, because it was a respite from the nothing. Someone held her, someone strong, and she was sure she screamed when they delivered a breathtaking punch to her kidneys.

Whoever they were, they were strong, fast, and knew exactly how to take down a person who couldn't even see to fight back.

She barely felt the tape around her wrists.

Light re-emerged, or perhaps the darkness fled. Either way, she found herself staring into the face of death, and tried to kick and scream. She couldn't shout, because there was tape across her mouth and her legs were bound together. The white skull under a black motorcycle helmet just stared back.

"Ow, fuck, fuck, fuck you Grue," a white figure on the floor behind the skull-faced man managed. "There's always one who freaks out and..." he gasped for air, "… and starts shooting wildly."

"He's only bruised," a blonde girl Jamelia hadn't noticed before said, stepping out of a patch of shadows. They seemed barely deserving of that name; the shadows of the alleyway, compared to the terrible blackness of the darkness, seemed faded and grey. Still, they were enough to conceal someone in an almost skintight costume of blacks and purples, who wore a Grecian theatrical masque which left her lips exposed. "Aren't you glad we insisted you get that armour in your costume, Regent?" she said teasingly. "Although if you'd made it thicker, you won't have that nasty bruise on your collarbone."

"Fuck… ow, ow, ow, fuck you, Tatt," the boy – yes, he was just a boy, only in his mid-teens from the voice – gasped. "That was way too close to my head. Fuck you."

"Tell you what, I'm not up for that, but if you ask nicely, maybe Dr Bitch will kiss it better? And maybe a little more, if you're going to keep on playing up how hurt you are."

"Enough," the skull-faced man in black said. "What do we do with her and the other one?"

The blonde shrugged. "She wasn't expecting to see us here. That means she was here for another reason. Patrol?" Her eyes flickered to Jamelia. "No. She was responding to another call. But with the rally going on, they won't respond to her failure to check in for quite a while." She smiled down at the officer. "Imagine what could happen in that time, before your buddies show up. All alone, in the hands of some wicked criminals."

Jamelia kicked and struggled, but she was trussed up like a fly caught by spiders.

The girl leant in, squatting down by her. "There's no point being like that," she told Jamelia. "We're not going to kill you, and you're not going to get free. You really might as well settle down. It'll be easier for all of us, you included." The girl gave her a sunny grin. "After all, you don't like being out here, sent out to do the scut work with no backup, right?" she said. "I guess everyone else was too busy to help you. They were busy watching those good patriotic Americans down by the docks march up and down and shout about how anyone who isn't like them should go back to where they came from."

"Funny thing, isn't it? You don't see many of them with Native American heritage. They mostly seem to be pretty pale. Sort of like the 'where they came from' themselves is Europe. They don't seem to mention that, do they? Especially when all those guys you work with parrot the same kind of thing, and they don't even bother trying to hide that they think that all 'real Americans' look just like them. They sent you out here, and _of course_ they didn't say anything about it, but the way he looked at you didn't feel too good, did it?"

The girl's grin widened. "Hey, remember how your partner totally has sympathies that way, too?" she added, with casual afterthought. "Not really a surprise, is it?" She leaned forwards, and tucked a pigeon-feather behind Jamelia's ear. "He sent you into the alleyway first, didn't he? Out in the rain, while he talked to your witness. Wonder if he left anything out of his report." She patted the older woman on the head. "Nah, that's probably just vile insinuation from an untrustworthy criminal," she said. "I mean, it's not like he's done anything else that would suggest that he'd rather be off marching with the Patriots, right?"

"We'll leave them in the bathrooms in the building, out of the rain," the skull-faced man said. Behind him, a monstrous hound growled, and Jamelia stopped moving, trying to not even breathe. There was another figure standing back there, beside the hound. How many of them were there?

"And I bet your bosses are going to cover up what we took from there," the blonde continued, heedless. "Hey, I wonder _who _runs this place? What's worth taking, out in some run down office space? Well, I guess we're just like them, eh? Neither of us want news of this nice little toy getting out. So please don't think of it when you're tied up, 'kay?"

"We'd do worse, but Grue is a softie," the white-clad boy said, clutching his shoulder. His costume was almost as dirty as she was, from his fall in the alley. He hefted a sceptre he held in his uninjured arm. "I'm not going to enjoy this," he said, the grin on his face putting lie to the statement.

Then there was only pain, followed by the relief of blackness.

* * *

><p>...<p>

* * *

><p>Just another attack by powered criminals, the after action report said. A minor parahuman gang, called the Undersiders. No police casualties and no other violence involved, so it was low priority.<p>

When Jamelia asked around once she got out of hospital, she was told that the gang had stolen hard drives from the premises. The safes had been opened with the passwords, and emptied. It was suspected they were working for hire, carrying out industrial espionage.

When she asked again, more forcefully, she was put on compassionate leave and was booked in for a psychiatric evaluation.

* * *

><p>...<p> 


	12. Namakarana 2-01

**An Imago of Rust and Crimson**

**Arc 2 – Namakarana**

**Chapter 2.01**

It was the howl of the wind against my window which woke me. Groggily I massaged my eyes and reached for my glasses, clambering out of bed.

The weather was vile outside. I couldn't tell if the sun had risen or not. I checked my clock again. 6:14 flashed at me. Well, it wouldn't be up, but it should have been getting light. It could have passed for midnight. It didn't even have the decency to be a dramatic thunderstorm. It was just relentless rain, apparently trying to conquer the land in the name of Poseidon.

I blinked, tugged my glasses down to the brink of my nose, and shifted my vision to the Other Place. Oh. It was raining blood. How wonderful. I stared out through gore-covered windows, barely able to see through the layer covering the dirty glass. The coppery scent crept in, just at the edge of my perception. Now, what on earth did that mean?

Probably nothing good. Well. That was a pretty shitty omen to start off any day, but it was particularly bad for the day of my evaluation. My chance to get out of here, to be free, for the first time in seventeen days. Two and a half weeks. Almost two-thirds of a month. And now that I'd thought that, I'd completely ruined any chance of getting back to sleep. I could feel butterflies in my stomach. And I quickly dropped out of the Other Place, in case that metaphor was literally true in that place.

At least I'd slept well. I was now on sleeping pills and they really helped. I simply _felt _better now I was getting seven hours rest a night, minimum. Usually more, because I was finding myself going to bed early simply because I was bored. And I wasn't remembering my dreams, either. I may have still been dreaming, because I often found my covers twisted around my legs when I woke, like I'd been trying to run, but I didn't remember them and that was good enough for me.

Of course, now I'd be thinking all day about how it was _raining blood _in the Other Place. That had been something I really didn't want to see. It was the smell which was the worst bit. When I was looking out through the glass, I could convince myself that it was just like something on the television. But the coppery ironness crept up on me, reminded me that it was as real as anything in the Other Place – and wasn't _that _a question?

I couldn't believe it was raining blood out there just because I was nervous. That made no sense. And I really didn't want to think about what else could be making something like that happen.

But if I was going to get up, it was time for my self-imposed exercise regime. Even if it was cold. And it _was_ cold. I glared out at the weather, quietly cursing it for waking me up. And being cold. But I couldn't change that – well I _almost certainly _couldn't change that – and if I was going to get up, I had to follow my routine. I had to get in shape. If I'd been stronger, maybe I could have fought the Emma-Sophia-Madison-demon thing. And the diet in the canteens here was horribly unhealthy. I half-suspected it was designed to keep the patients feeling too bloated to think of acting up.

Grumbling to myself, I began the first of many sit-ups.

When I was done, I was aching all over, and had almost managed to put what I'd seen out there out of my mind. Of course, as soon as I thought about how I'd put it out of my mind, I was thinking about it again, which wasn't the most helpful thing my mind could do. But I couldn't do anything about that.

Wait. Yes, I could. I took a deep breath, shifted my senses to the Other Place, and frowned. This had just been something I'd stumbled on in the past fortnight, when I'd been practicing – okay, playing around – with my power. It still wasn't easy. So, what would I need to do for this? What kind of construct would I need to build?

I would be affecting myself, so I looked over to the dirty mirror. I'd found it was easier if I just copied what I saw, rather than starting from scratch in my imagination. After a moment's concentration I exhaled, and my twin from the mirror stood in front of me. She was drenched in blood – it was all she was thinking of – which made her look sort of like Carrie. Her expression was locked in a grimace like a... no, it actually _was_ a theatrical mask, like one of those Greek ones, made of some pure white material. It was untouched by blood, apart from two dribbling streams coming from the corners of the eyes. It made her look like she was crying in fear.

I breathed in and then out, long and slow, and she flinched, masked face darting from side to side. Good. The construct hadn't fallen apart, like a few I'd tried. She would be able to sustain what I did next. I built iron chains around her, trapping her so she could barely move, and then her shape blurred as I inhaled her. She swirled like water down a plughole, and I felt the worry just drain away. I was smiling when I was done. Good. I couldn't let my worry ruin things for me today.

I changed from my sleeping-pyjamas to my going-around-during-the-day pyjamas, and then realised I really should have a shower. Gathering my things, I headed for the bathroom. I was in luck; waking early meant that I didn't have to wait for it.

The shower may have been vaguely patronising in how it was clearly designed to stop us from doing anything but going in and pulling the 'on' lever, but it was warm and I had it all to myself. My missing fingernails were starting to grow back, but I still had to wear latex gloves because they weren't meant to get wet. The pink of new skin was everywhere on them, but at least they weren't infected. I had to keep an eye on them, though. I'd hate to lose a finger.

By the time I was done, I could hear other people stirring. I dried myself off, and went to grab breakfast from the canteen. Just a small one. Hopefully this would be the last breakfast I had here, and it wasn't nice enough that I wanted to relish it. The toast tasted like cardboard in my mouth. It was bad enough that I flipped to the Other Place, but that just managed to add a metallic taste to the cardboard. I went and groaned in the bathroom for a bit, but didn't actually throw up, so I just returned to the common room in Wilson.

Sam and Leah were awake, sitting next to each other on the couch. It looked like they'd picked up breakfast already, but were eating it through here.

Sometimes I sort of thought there was something going on between those two. I wasn't sure, though, and they'd tried to talk to me about boys – which had been a pretty short conversation, because I didn't have much to say beyond 'Boys don't seem to be as bad to each other as girls'. It confused me, but it'd be really awkward to pry, so I did my best to ignore it."Nervous?" Leah asked, half-turning to look at me.

I nodded mutely.

Sam nodded at me, looking over the top of today's paper. She had managed to get one of the copies from breakfast today. "Don't muck this up," she said. "If you come back here in tears, it'll be really embarrassing."

"I'll try not to," I said, smiling weakly. "I don't want to be in here any longer than I have to." I paused. "Not that I want to be rid of you, but…"

"Oh, spare me that," she said, stretching. "I've got an evaluation next week too, if my next lot of blood tests pass. If you're out, then I'll have someone to talk to." She winced. "That'd be nice. It was Leah making herself ill that… uh, got me wobbly. So pass it and we can meet up weekend after next or something."

That was life in a short-to-medium-wing ward, from what I'd seen and heard. There was a pretty constant flow of new faces. Emily had left a few days ago, and there were two new girls, Tori and Henna, who'd come since I'd arrived. "I wonder when Kirsty has her next evaluation?" I said.

Sam looked back up from her paper. "Who?" she asked, distracted.

"Kirsty. Next evaluation?"

"Who?" She frowned, a blank expression on her face.

I stared back just as blankly. "Kirsty. Scars on her face. Worse than mine. In Room Four."

"Oh! Her." Sam blinked, still looking somewhat blank. "No idea," she said. "I don't talk to her."

"I can't recall a single conversation I've had with her," Leah chimed in. "Just the…" she traced lines on her face, and winced, looking at me. "Sorry," she said quickly, "at least yours are just sort of… pink. Not like hers."

I gave a one-shouldered shrug. No, Kirsty didn't talk to people. She just stayed in her room. I hadn't seen her in any of the sessions, either. I'd signed up for quite a few, because – dear God – the boredom was the worst thing in here. And it also meant that I appeared to be keen and willing and taking active control of my wellbeing and everything else that Hannah, as the wing supervisor, said we should be.

I'd set myself the goal that I'd be out of here as soon as possible. And if I managed it today, it'd be just seventeen days.

I was fairly proud of myself for that.

I looked at the clock. "Well," I said, "about two hours to go. I… I think I'm ready. I just want it to be over and done with."

"Oh dear, no!" Leah said, frowning as she looked at me. "You can't go to your evaluation meeting looking like that!"

"Like what?" I said, confused.

"Like that!" She stood up and she put her too-thin hands on her too-thin waist. "You're coming with me, and I'm going to brush your hair properly!"

"They don't let me have a hairbrush or a hairdryer," I protested. "I know it's not that great, but it's the best I can manage."

She grinned at me. "Not the best I can do. Let me go ask Hannah for them."

I smiled back. It was strange. I'd missed this kind of thing so badly. Emma and I used to be like sisters. I hadn't had any real friends for a year and more.

"Technically, it's not breaking the rules," she added. "After all, I'm the one who's using them. So I won't even get in trouble." She paused. "Hopefully."

Yes, that was the worry. Because I was one of the patients in the wing marked in my files as a suicide risk, there were little perfectly normal things which they didn't let me have. But hopefully I'd be out of here soon.

And when I was out of here, I'd be able to keep proper notes on what my powers could do, without having to be worried about nurses reading them and getting worried about legitimate observations. I couldn't trust them not to read anything I wrote. I was sure they read my homework. Especially some of the science homework, where I'd got help from one of the nurses. I just knew, somehow, they'd misunderstand perfectly innocent and accurate records like 'Dr Samuels is bloated – rotting flesh around lips. Strong smell of alcohol mixed with gasoline. Blood stains on fingers'.

It was very unfair.

I had concluded that probably meant that either he had a drinking problem which he was trying to cover up, or had killed someone in a drink-driving accident. Or possibly both. I wasn't sure what the rotting lips meant. Maybe something romance-related, like 'he's lying when he says he loves his partner' or 'his lips are rotting because he's a habitual liar'. Or possibly just mouth cancer. But I was just guessing there.

That's what a notebook which I could actually record my observations in would help with. There were some elements of shared symbolism – for example, another girl in another wing who also had anorexia had shared symbolism with Leah – so if I could keep a list of shared elements, it could help me work out what each thing meant.

Stupid useless obtuse power which didn't give me straight answers.

My evaluation was at 10:15, and apart from the fact that I'd spent the hour beforehand feeling sick to my stomach with nerves, I was feeling ready. My hair was washed and dried and brushed, I'd spent time in front of the mirror making sure I didn't look crazy, and I'd practiced some of the questions that Sam and Leah had been asked before. I wasn't sure what this entailed, but I was about as ready as I could be.

I had set myself some ground rules for this meeting. No looking into the Other Place. No wool-gathering when I was meant to be listening. No breaking down into tears or anything like that. I was going to be on my best behaviour. My dad was waiting for me, and I didn't want to let him down.

"How are you feeling?" he asked me, just outside the room where it was going to be. That was the first thing he said.

"Nervous," I admitted.

"You'll be fine," he said. He was trying to assure me, I could tell, and checking the Other Place I could see that his fires were damped, wavering and flickering in a fretful way. In the fire, I could see images, dancing like ash. Putting them together, most of them seemed to be him, staring into space. I thought he'd been missing me. I'd been missing him too.

"I'll try to be," I said weakly, returning my vision to the normal. He gave me a hug, and I hugged back.

"Good luck," he said.

Going into the room, Dr Vanderbough was there, and Hannah, and a few other people I couldn't remember the names of or didn't recognise. There was one of the doctors who I'd seen around the place, a woman in a neat black suit and glasses who looked like an administrator and who was probably there from the school trying to get me out of here ASAP if she wasn't from the Men in Black, and a few others.

I sat up straight. I was careful to look attentive and smile. I was a perfectly well-balanced and normal girl who had just happened to have a nervous breakdown when locked in a locker filled with fermented tampons. Which, when you thought about it, was a perfectly natural and understandable reaction.

Honestly, I was pretty surprised I wasn't more traumatised by it. I think I would have been, if it hadn't been for the thing with the insects and the nails, which sort of made mundane things look rather less meaningful, and also gave me something else to focus on. So what if I had nightmares? I could live with them.

I'd considered what would have happened if I hadn't got superpowers from that experience. That would have been, like, possibly just the _worst_. Wow. That would have been just terrible. Emma and co almost certainly wouldn't have done it if they knew they were going to give me psychometry and the capacity to make invisible monsters which obeyed my every order.

Well, they had done it. And here I was now. It was just as well I was a good person, I thought to myself. If I was as bad as them, I could probably make their lives very unpleasant and they wouldn't even know it was me.

So they had better not try anything again.

"So, Taylor," Hannah asked. "How are you feeling?"

I put on my best brave face. "A little bit nervous," I said. "But generally better apart from today and," I spread my hands, "this whole thing."

"That's good, that's good. And don't worry, it's okay to be nervous. We're just going to have a talk – I've already showed them my notes on your progress… which is very promising, by the way. So, shall we get started?"

…

"And… well, that's about it," Dr Vanderbough said. "I don't believe she's at any immediate risk to herself, and so she can be safely discharged."

I wasn't listening to that conversation. Well, okay, clearly I was. But I wasn't listening to it in any normal way. I'd had my talk, and then they called my dad in. I was waiting in the anteroom, eating biscuits one of the nurses had left me and drinking hot chocolate. The chair was quite comfortable, even in the Other Place where it was overstuffed and slightly warm to the touch. Considering the weather, I didn't mind a little extra warmth. The blood-rain in the Other Place had thinned, and most of the liquid coming from the sky was now water. I couldn't bring myself to be curious about it, though. Not when I had other things to think about.

I looked very normal staring out of the window, especially if you couldn't see what I was actually staring at. A pair of little eyeless china-doll cherubs, holding up a cracked television screen. I'd sent an angel made of barbed-wire with a CCTV camera for a head into the room to observe where my dad was meeting with the doctors and staff to talk about my future.

With a little experimental fiddling, I'd even managed to get the TV-screen to show me the normal world, rather than the Other Place.

Actually, now that I thought of it, that seemed like a very promising development. I had just shown it was possible to see things in the normal world, while in the Other Place. So maybe I could overlay the normal world on the Other Place, or have the normal world shown on my eyelids, so I could change between the two by opening and closing my eyes?

Thoughts for later. This was what I needed a notepad for. Right now, I had a meeting to spy on.

"So she's better?" my dad asked.

Dr Vanderbough pursed his lips. "We believe she doesn't need to be an in-patient anymore," he said cautiously. "As I said earlier, I would strongly recommend that she have regular meetings with a therapist for at least a few months. She improved notably when I put her on some mild sleeping pills so she was getting proper amounts of rest – she was having nightmares every night, and the hallucinations seemed to have been contributed to by that. Ideally, her doses should be lowered so she doesn't become dependent on them. They should only be a short term measure."

I didn't like the sound of that. I liked being able to sleep. Also, I _was _'better', because I'd never gone crazy in the first place.

"She's going to need you through the next bit," Hannah said, folding her hands on her lap. "Here, things are stable and calm. She may find it more difficult in normal day to day life. The return to school will be especially stressful."

"I've observed she has trust issues," Dr Vanderbough says. "She doesn't open up to anyone. I've had to coax every little step we've made out of her. I'm fairly certain that she's telling the truth about the bullying, with no more exaggeration than would be normal. A long-term, systematic bullying campaign like that would explain several things I've noted about her. It's a very normal reaction, but it's getting in the way of her recovery. She seems to care about you – she talked about you fairly frequently. You're going to have to be a solid place for her to stand on, someone who won't judge her for what she tells you."

The betrayal stung. How dare he tell my dad I had trust issues? What gave him the right? He'd said that things in that room were between me and him, and then he'd gone and – how dare he! That nasty man-spider, worming his way in to…

… huh. A bit of self-awareness caught me. Wow. That chain of thought had been outright paranoid.

Maybe… uh. Maybe they had a point.

I slumped down, cupping my hands over my mouth, and tried to control my sudden hyperventilation. So he thought that the way I had no reason to trust anyone, adults or children, was getting in the way of my recovery? That was ridiculous, surely. But why… why hadn't I told my dad I was being bullied earlier? Why hadn't I tried harder to get help from the school?

Oh, I had my reasons. I had plenty of reasons. He couldn't have done anything. I didn't want him to worry. I was ashamed. I'd tried to tell the school earlier, when it had been less bad, and it hadn't helped. If I told on those three now, no one would help me and they'd just step up the bullying, so I'd just tough it out until I graduated and could go off and leave them behind. All part of the familiar litany of reasons which I'd repeated again and again.

At what point had the reasons taken over from trying to do anything?

Well. He knew about the bullying now. And I'd bet anything that the school did, from the police and him kicking up a fuss. In a twisted way, I had leverage now. After all, if they let it go on, and I really did kill myself, they'd be in deep PR shit. I wasn't going to do that, of course. I'd never been suicidal. But they didn't know that. And I had my collection of notes on the bullying, all those records of phone calls, and a diary of events.

At the very least, I should let my dad know about the existence of the diary. That thing with the locker… that was a step up. Way, way up. I could have died from that. I still didn't have full feeling in my hands. I'd never thought Emma would do something like that. Adults might want to shrug off name-calling and stealing my stuff as childish things. They couldn't shrug off this kind of thing. Especially men, I bet. I'd just have to say 'locker full of used tampons' and they'd be freaking out.

I didn't think they'd try to kill me, but I hadn't thought they'd do something which could really hurt me right up until they did. It wasn't paranoia when they might actually be out to get you.

The door to the meeting room opened, and my dad was the first one out. He was smiling widely, in an open, relieved way which managed to make me feel guilty about how much he must have been worrying. I rose, and forced myself to smile back.

"It's good news?" I asked.

And there was just a little bit of me which pragmatically pointed out that if I owned up to some things which didn't matter, it would be easier to keep the fact that I was a parahuman from him. I'd really be protecting him from that. He didn't need to know I was a more bizarre Thinker/Master mix than anyone I'd been able to find online. Not yet. Not until I was sure I wanted anyone to know. I couldn't let him be threatened by people who might want to use me.

Compared to that, telling him the truth about the bullying would be nothing.

One small step at a time.


End file.
